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COPWIGHT DEPOSIT. 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 




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31 Jtittic l^ijitorp of 2ilmerican Itife 



Our First Century 



By 
GEORGE GARY EGGLESTON 

Author of 

<«A CAPTAIN IN THE RANKS" 
"RUNNING THE RIVER," ETC. 

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS 




NEW YORK 

%. ^. 25arne^ S. Companp 

1905 






UBBARY of CONGRESS 
two Coptes rttjcwvtso 

MAY 13 lyuD 

COPY B. 



Copyright igoj 
By a. S. BARNES & COMPANY 



Published May igoj 



INTRODUCTION 

IT is the purpose of this book to present, on the basis 
of a connected narrative, a picture of life in America 
during the seventeenth century. 

The text-books used in the schools must cover the 
entire history of our country within a very brief space. 
They must, therefore, confine themselves to a brief recital 
of facts, chiefly political and military. The larger his- 
tories, in which life, manners, customs and the conditions 
governing them are treated with admirable scholarship, 
must of necessity be too voluminous and too costly to be 
available for the use of busy readers. 

In the present work the author seeks to give a popular 
account of the hfe, manners and customs of those who 
first planted English colonies along the Atlantic coast, 
and laid the foundations of our country. The manner 
of men they were, the ideas they brought with them 
across the sea, the mistakes they made in entering upon 
a new life, under strange conditions, the means they 
adopted of adjusting themselves to their new environment, 
the forces that gave form to their systems of government, 
the occupations in which they engaged, their religious be- 
liefs, their amusements, the clothes they wore and the 
food they ate — all these phases of their social and eco- 

(V) 



vi INTRODUCTION 

nomic existence have seemed possible of popular presen- 
tation in a little history of colonial life. 

For a narrative written with this view, rather than in 
the older and more conventional way, there has seemed 
to be warrant in the increased interest felt in the life 
and customs of our ancestors, and in the abundance of 
new material furnished by the special students of the 
last fifteen years. 

Edward Eggleston, whose articles in the Century Mag- 
azine about twenty years ago showed the richness of the 
field, was perhaps the first of the modern American 
school of writers upon colonial history. Of the minute in- 
vestigation shown in his " The Beginners of a Nation " 
and " The Transit of Civilization," it is not necessary to 
speak. More recently Cheyney, Andrews, Tyler, Farrand, 
Bourne and the other scholars, who have contributed to 
Professor Hart's very notable history of " The American 
Nation," have made special studies of peculiar import- 
ance, and, during very recent years, a number of works 
of consequence have appeared, among them Bruce's 
'' Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth 
Century," and Professor Osgood's "American Colonies 
ill the Seventeenth Century." These exhaustive works 
have greatly enriched our knowledge of the early his- 
tory of Englishmen in America. We have had also 
many special studies of particular phases of colonial life, 
such as the admirably interesting books of Mrs. Alice 
Morse Earle, Miss Esther Singleton and others. 



INTRODUCTION vii 

The present work is intended to be a popular presenta- 
tion of the principal facts of early colonial life, concern- 
ing itself chiefly with the life of the people. In writing 
it the author has used historical events as landmarks, as- 
suming some knowledge of the principal facts of pubHc 
history on the part of the reader. He has not deemed 
it desirable to encumber the book with an account of the 
earlier Spanish and French occupations of this continent. 
His work properly begins with the story of the earliest 
permanent English .colonies whose settlement upon the 
Atlantic coast was in fact the founding of our nation. 
He has endeavored to trace the life story of the colonists 
during their first century of toil, hardship and conquest. 

In telling this story the author has been glad to sup- 
plement his narrative with pictorial accompaniments, 
most of which have been chosen with a view to the illus- 
tration of life. 

The author knows of no book written from precisely 
this point of view, and it is his hope that the human in- 
terest of the story may commend it to that large class of 
readers for whose use the small general histories are too 
compact and meagre, and the elaborate special works too 
comprehensive. For the general reader who is not a 
special student, and for school libraries, it is believed 
that a little history of colonial life may commend itself 
to acceptance. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

INTRODUCTION ..... V 

I. A STORY OF ACCIDENTS . . . .1 

II. A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES . . . 21 

III. JOHN SMITH ...... 30 

IV. LIFE IN JAMESTOWN .... 3/ 
V. THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY . . . . 4 1 

VI. THE FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES . 6 1 
VIL MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE SETTLEMENTS 
AND THE DUTCH COLONY OF NEW NETHER- 
LAND . . . . . . .82 

VIII. MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS AND THE 
SETTLEMENT OF CONNECTICUT AND RHODE 

ISLAND ....... 89 

IX. THE CONFEDERATION OF THE NEW ENGLAND 

COLONIES ...... 96 

X. THE CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND . 1 01 

XI. MARYLAND ...... I06 

XII. KING Philip's war . . . . . ii i 

XIII. THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA . . . II 5 

XIV. NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA . . 1 29 
XV. EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT . . 1 39 

XVI. THE FRENCH IN AMERICA . . . . 1 60 

XVII. RAPINE, SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION . I /I 

(ix) 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 
XVIII. EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY, AGRICULTURE, 

TRADE AND INTERCOURSE . , . 1 80 

XIX. EARLY COLONIAL MANUFACTURES . . 1 8/ 

XX. EDUCATION, RELIGION AND MARRIAGES . 1 92 

XXI. LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES . . . 2O4 

XXIL WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY— THE SERVANT 

QUESTION SOME FEATURES OF DOMESTIC 

LIFE . . . . . . .219 

XXIII. DRESS, SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS — SUNDAY 

LAWS AND SUNDAY OBSERVANCES . 229 

XXIV. SUPERSTITION AND WITCHCRAFT . . .239 
XXV. COMMERCE, NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 243 

XXVI. THE WORK OF OUR FIRST CENTURY . . 254 
APPENDIX, TABLE OF IMPORTANT CONTEMPO- 
RANEOUS EVENTS PREPARED BY PROF. 

HERMAN V. AMES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 
PENNSYLVANIA. . . . . .257 

INDEX 263 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Mansion built at Medford, Mass., in 1634, for Gov- 
ernor Cradock of the Massachusetts Company . Front 

Pikeman .......... 

Spanish explorations in North America to 1600 . 

Musketeer 

Arms in the first half of the 17th century 

English explorations in North America to 1607 

First settlement in Virginia ..... 

Present appearance of Jamestown 

Indian houses in the Village of Secotan 

Capt. John Smith 

Indian kindling fire ...... 

Virginia by the charter of 1609 .... 

War Club 

Manner of boiling in an earthen pot . 

Indian manner of broiling ' . 

Pocahontas 

Puritan gentleman ...... 

Puritan lady 

New England by the patent of 1630 

Chair of Carver, first governor of Plymouth Colony . 

The Myles Standish House, Duxbury, built by his son 
1666 

Sword of Myles Standish, of ancient Persian manufacture 

John Winthrop . . 

The Aborigines ....... 

New Netherland . . . 

The earliest picture of New Amsterdam, about 1650 . 

Dutch women of old times ...... 

(xi) 



Page 

ispiece 

4 
6 
8 

13 
16 
22 
28 
3-1 
33 
38 
42 

43 
45 
48 

51 
62 
63 
64 

67 



71 
73 
76 

79 
85 
86 

87 



xii " ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

Puritan of the middle class 90 

Puritan of the middle class ....... 92 

New Amsterdam in Stuyvesant's time .... 96 

Settlements on the coast of North America in the middle of 

the 17th century 98 

Street in New Amsterdam 103 

Peter Stuyvesant 104 

Lord Baltimore . . . . . . . . .106 

Lord Baltimore penny . . . ". . . . .107 

Maryland by the original grant to Lord Baltimore . . 108 
King Philip's samp bowl, and lock of gun with which he was 

killed . . . . . . . . . -113 

Carolina by the grant of 1663 116 

Carolina elephant piece 118 

Seal of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina — reverse . . 120 

Huguenot merchant . . . . . . . .122 

Huguenot merchant's wife 126 

William Penn . . . . . . . . .13- 

William Penn's chair, in Independence Hall, Philadel- 

pl^ia 134 

Wampum belt, presented by Indians to William Penn . .136 

Penn's house in Philadelphia . . . . . . 137 

New England elephant piece . . . 

The Middle Colonies 

The Virginia penny . . . ' . 

Champlain 

French Coureur des Bois .... 

La Salle 

French gentleman ..... 
Matchlock gun and matchlock .... 
Colonial plow with wooden mold-board, 1706 
French explorations in North America to 1700 
Elder Brewster's chair ..... 



. 141 
. 145 
. 149 
. 161 
. 162 
. . 165 
. 168 
174 
. 177 
179 
. . 183 
A chafing; dish . . . . . . . . .188 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Xlll 



620 



Silk winding 

A wedding in New Amsterdam 

John Eliot .... 

Armor worn by the Pilgrims in i 
Ancient handmade spade 
Sawmill ..... 

Wrought iron lamp and sadiron 
A Colonial flaxwheel 
Primitive mode of grinding corn 
Colonial loom ..... 

Watch and chain of the colonial period 

Costume of a burgomaster of New Amsterdam 

Costume from portrait of Major Robert Pike 

Costume from the portrait of Jonathan Mason 

Collar of Gov. John Endicott 

Collar of Gov. Edward Winslow 

Dutch costume ...... 

Captain Edward Teach .... 

The author and publishers wish to acknowledge the courtes) 
tury Company and the American Book Company in granting 
to use several of the illustrations luhich appear in this book. 



Page 
190 
197 
199 
206 
209 
211 
215 
223 
226 
229 
230 
232 
233 
234 
235 
236 

237 
. 251 

0/ the C en- 
Permission 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



CHAPTER I 



A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 



COLUMBUS discovered America by accident. He 
blundered upon the country while trying to make 
his way to the eastern coasts of Asia, and so long 
as he lived he did not know what he had found. He 
died at last in the belief that he had made his way across 
the ocean to the Indies. 

For a hundred years afterwards nearly everything 
done with respect to America was founded upon mis- 
conception, and everything well done was largely the 
result of accident. It was accident that gave the name 
America to the New World. It was by accident that 
Cabot and the rest discovered various parts of the North 
American mainland. They were searching for some- 
thing quite other than this. Little by little it had 
dawned upon their intelligence that America was not 
Asia, but was instead a new continent, hitherto unknown, 
obstructing the pathway from Europe to Asia by the 

A 1 



2 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

westward route. This was clearly demonstrated when 
Balboa, in 15 13, saw the Pacific Ocean from a peak in 
Darien, and still more clearly when one of Magellan's 
ships ( 1 5 20) circumnavigated the globe, passing through 
the strait that bears that great navigator's name. 

But it was an age of credulous ignorance and greed, 
and for a long time Europeans persisted in the belief 
that there must be some water way through this conti- 
nent, by which ships could reach " The Indies," as all the 
Asiatic countries were then called in Europe. 

The universal desire in Europe at that time was for 
wealth, and in their eagerness to get the rich trade of the 
Orient, European men refused to believe that a great con- 
tinent stood obstinately in the way. 

Even after the Spanish explorer, De Soto, had marched 
for years over the country from Florida to what is now 
Arkansas, in 1539 and the succeeding years, thus get- 
ting some small notion of the vast expanse of the con- 
tinent, shipmasters and their merchant owners in 
Europe, refused to give up the notion that there was a 
water way through America at some point. This belief 
survived in some measure even to the end of the eight- 
eenth century. 

After exploration had conclusively proved that no 
such water way pierced the continent in its southern 
parts, imaginative geographers made maps showing that 
a little farther north the continent narrowed to nothing- 
ness, and was crossed by broad straits. Some of them 



A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 3 

even represented it as ending- about where the northern 
boundary of the United States now hes, leaving an open 
ocean north of it. 

In those days the scientific habit of mind, which is 
common to all men now, did not exist. A man of mod- 
ern mind, upon seeing one of these maps, would in- 
stantly have asked for the facts upon which it rested. 
He would not have been content to take the mapmaker's 
word for the existence of the water ways shown in the 
charts. He would have insisted upon knowing how the 
mapmaker knew of their existence. 

" Have you been there to see for yourself .? " he would 
have asked. " Or has anybody else sailed over those 
waters, and brought back a trustworthy report about 
them .? " And, getting no satisfactory answer to these 
questions, the man of modern mind would have refused 
to invest his money and risk his ships and the lives of 
his men upon such geographical guesses. 

But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men's 
minds did not act as they do now, and it is necessary to 
bear that fact constantly in mind if we would understand 
what happened. 

The continent that Columbus found in his effort to 
make his way to the eastern shores of Asia by sailing 
westward was capable of producing food enough to feed 
all mankind, but very few people thought, for a hundred 
years and more, of cultivating that continent and making 
it feed anybody. For a hundred years and more very 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



few of those who thought of America thought of anything 
in connection with this continent except to find a way 
through it in order to trade with the Indies, or else to 
find gold or silver somewhere within the newly discov- 
ered country. 

The Spaniards found the gold and silver in Mexico, 
and in Peru. They were also real colonizers in some 
degree, though their chief concern was for the discovery 
of gold and silver. That fact 
gave a new impetus to the idea 
that America was of compara- 
tively little worth except as a 
gold or silver mine. Everybody 
in Europe who in any way con- 
cerned himself with thoughts of 
America continued to hunt either 
for a passageway through the con- 

^^^^ , .^-. tinent, to Asia, or for a region 

I /' f/--i''^' ^^^ which the precious metals 

^^M^^ ^^^"' abounded. No attention what- 

ever was paid to the splendid 
productiveness of the American 
soil. Not an adequate thought was anywhere entertained, 
and especially in England, of the possibilities of wealth 
that lay in the cultivation of a country whose soil and 
climate were capable of producing more food stuffs for 
the consumption of mankind than had ever before been 
produced anywhere on earth. 




A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 5 

It was a period of gross ignorance among the people 
generally, though a select few were learned according to 
the highest standards of that age. In order to under- 
stand how gross the popular ignorance was it is neces- 
sary to remember that the great majority of men did not 
travel in those days. There were no railroads, no steam- 
boats, no telegraphs, no telephones, no common schools, 
no newspapers, no magazines and very few books. There 
were only a few people who could read even such books 
as existed. 

The result of all this was that men knew almost noth- 
ing of the world beyond the hills that happened to bound 
their own horizon. It is difficult in our time of popular 
education, newspapers, railroads, telegraphs and cheap 
books to understand the condition of mind which then 
prevailed in Europe ; yet we must understand it if we 
would understand what happened in that time. 

The Spaniards conquered Mexico and Peru and made 
settlements at St. Augustine in Florida, at Sante Fe in 
New Mexico and elsewhere. But these settlements were 
all made with a primary view to the discovery of gold 
and the exploitation of the country for profit. There 
was nowhere any sufficient thought of settling the country 
and living in it, and cultivating it for the sake of what 
its soil could produce. The thought of homes in Amer- 
ica was not yet born. 

The English claimed practically all of Canada and all 
of what now constitutes the United States north of 



6 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



Florida by virtue of the discoveries made by John Cabot 
and other English navigators of the early time. But for 
nearly a hundred years the English made no attempt to 




Spanish Explorations in North America to 1600. 

plant colonies here or turn to account in any way the 
splendid resources of the country they owned. 

There were several reasons for this. Some of those 



A STORY OF ACCIDP:NTS 7 

reasons have been indicated already. Another was that 
the Spanish power was at that time dominant. Wh«i 
the French had made a settlement upon the southern 
Atlantic coast it had been promptly assailed and destroyed 
by the Spanish who claimed dominion over the entire 
continent, and who had power to enforce the claim. 

Then came a period of sea fighting in which at last 
the power of Spain was crippled, and England rose to a 
place among the nations of the first class. 

In that day ships at sea made war upon each other and 
captured each other with very little reference indeed to 
the question whether or not a state of war existed between 
the two nations whose flags the several ships carried at 
their mastheads. Spain and England were nominally at 
peace with each other but they were in fact enemies and if 
an English ship could capture at sea a Spanish galleon 
loaded with treasure she did so without hesitation, without 
a qualm of conscience and without the least fear on the part 
of her commander, of his being called to account by his 
sovereign. This was a species of piracy of course but it 
was piracy of a kind at that time recognized as legitimate. 

The profits of this sort of freebooting on the sea were 
so great that many daring English navigators engaged in 
the business, dividing the proceeds of it with the queen. 
Drake, Hawkins, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and the rest of 
the great English sea barons by their assaults upon Span- 
ish commerce greatly enriched themselves and their sov- 
ereign and greatly crippled Spain. 



8 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



At last they succeeded in provoking open and declared 
war between Spain and England. 

Then came the Spanish Armada, called at that time the 
" Invincible Armada." This was a great collection of 
Spanish warships which were sent to conquer England 
and reduce that country to complete subjection to Spain. 
The ships were so many in number and so strong in 
their armament that it was believed that no fleet any- 
where could possibly hold them in check for one moment. 
Curiously enough the Armada was placed in command 
of a land soldier, who knew nothing of navigation, and 

who at sea was always so 
violently seasick as to be in- 
capable of directing the 
movements of his own fleet. 
Nevertheless, under this in- 
capable commander the Ar- 
mada sailed to attack the 
coasts of England and to 
conquer that country. 

In order to oppose it, the 
great English freebooting 
navigators lay in wait in the 
channel, intending to assail 
it with all their vigor when- 
ever it should appear. 
They were very ill equipped. Queen Elizabeth, who 
at that time reigned in England, was a miser, so stingy 




A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 9 

that she refused even to let her sea captains provide their 
men with wholesome food and drink. Further than that, 
she limited them in their supplies of ammunition and 
brought her miserliness to bear in other ways that 
threatened to defeat their enterpri, ,e in defence of Eng- 
land. 

But these sea barons were men not easily daunted or 
discouraged. They knew tricks of seamanship that the 
Spaniards had never learned. They knew how to "tack " 
— or " beat " as we call it now — that is to say, how to 
sail upon a zigzag course against the wind. This gave 
them a very great advantage over the Spaniards, who 
knew only how to sail directly or very nearly before the 
wind. 

The result of all this was that the English navigators 
were able to keep out of the way of Spanish shot and 
shell whenever they chose, and to destroy the great 
Armada little by little at their leisure. They drove it 
up the channel, and destroyed ship after ship, until at 
last they forced the small remnant of the great Armada 
to flee northward around Scotland and Ireland where 
most of the ships were wrecked in storms with which the 
Spanish navigators did not know how to contend, and so 
the sea power of Spain was crippled. Hawkins and 
Drake and Gilbert, together with their kind, had made 
England instead of Spain the foremost maritime power 
in the world. 

Then it was that England's thought turned hopefully 



10 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

for the first time to the colonization of America. For 
the first time it was thought that an EngHsh colony 
planted on this continent might be protected by English 
ships against Spanish assault. The story of it is familiar 
to most readers, but it must be briefly recounted here 
as a setting for the history of life conditions which it is 
the purpose of this book to trace. Throughout the 
book the chronicle of external events given in succinct 
form is necessary as showing forth the conditions that 
made life what it was, 

Raleigh was full of enthusiasm in this cause. The ca- 
reers of the sea barons, including his own half-brother. 
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, had filled his romantic mind and 
his courageous soul with the spirit of enterprise. 

It was a time of seething intellectual activity in the 
British capital, in spite of the dull stupor of unintelligence 
that afflicted England outside of London. There were 
no clubs then, and no newspapers and particularly there 
was no intellectual life outside of London. The rest of 
the country was given up to sordid considerations of crops 
and the like. But in London it was a time of unusual 
intellectual ferment. The theatre answered then all. the 
purposes that the newspapers and the magazines and 
cheap books do to-day, and Shakespeare himself was at 
the head of the theatre. He and Marlowe and Ben Jon- 
son and Greene used to meet in the coffeehouses with 
such men as Drake and Gilbert and Raleigh and others 
who had navigated the seas all over the earth and who 



A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 11 

had brought back strangely interesting tales of that which 
they had seen and that which they had done and that 
which they had learned of other men's doings. 

Raleigh was Queen Elizabeth's favorite. That fact 
acted as a restraint upon him. He was ready not only 
to invest his money in lavish sums in order to colonize 
America, but also to go on his own account to the New 
World in order to build up colonies there which should 
add to the wealth of Great Britain, increase the power of 
that country and redound to its glory. If he had been 
permitted to go he would almost certainly have succeeded 
by virtue of his energy, his sense and his daring. But 
the queen said him nay. She would not allow him to ab- 
sent himself from the court and so all that was left for 
him to do was to send out colonies at his own expense 
and trust to others less capable than he for their man- 
agement. But it is not necessary to occupy space in 
telling the story of Sir Walter Raleigh's failures. 

One thing that for a long time prevented colonization 
from England was that the total population of that coun- 
try did not then exceed five million souls. In other 
words, there were fewer people in all England then than 
there are now in London alone — scarcely more than dwell 
now in New York City and its New Jersey environs. 
During a considerable part of the time before the people 
of England seriously considered these colonizing enter- 
prizes there was no surplus population in that country 
seeking a colonial outlet in any direction. Now, how- 



12 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

ever, a change in conditions had created such a popula- 
tion though it was of the most undesirable sort. The 
great importation of gold and silver into Europe had re- 
duced the purchasing power of money and correspond- 
ingly raised the cost of living in the Old World. The 
result of this was that many people who had before found 
it easy enough to support themselves now found it im- 
possible to do so by their unskilled labor. 

A little earlier another change in English industrial 
conditions had occurred. The profits of sheep raising 
became so much greater than those of plough farming 
that great areas which had previously been cultivated in 
grain and the like were laid down in pasture lands. In- 
asmuch as only one man was needed to attend a flock of 
sheep, grazing upon great stretches of pasture, where ten 
men had before been required to cultivate the land, great 
numbers of people were thrown out of employment. 
These it must be borne in mind were people belonging 
to the lowest classes of the population. They had no 
skill except the rude ability to hold the handle of a plough. 
They had no reserves of money anywhere, no savings, 
no mechanical ability, and no resources of any sort. The 
result of all this was that a multitude of half starved men 
were thrown upon the community, destitute of the means 
of support. As they were equally destitute of moral 
character they quickly became beggars, thieves and out- 
casts. 

When the time came for earnest efforts to be made to 



A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 



13 



colonize America this, chiefly, was the source of human 
supply to be drawn upon. It was about as unfit for the 




Arms in the first half of the 17th century. (From " Hewett's 
Armor," by permission.) 

1. Musketier and caliver-man. 

2. Musket caliver and bandaliers. 

3. Pikeman. 

4. Wheel-lock pistol and matchlock of a muscpiet, i6th century. 

(From examples in the Tower of London.) 

5. Musquetier. 



14 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

purpose of colonizing as any population ever was any- 
where in the world. There was in addition a still more 
worthless class of young "gentlemen" — that is to say, 
young men who had been brought up to regard work as 
unworthy of them, but who had no money and no skill in 
earning money. These also were available as emigrants, 
but their worthlessness for the colonization of a wilder- 
ness was even greater than that of the humbler unem- 
ployed. 

These were the conditions in which the first success- 
ful effort to plant an English colony in America was 
made. The fundamental error was that all such efforts 
were made not in behalf of the colonists and not in be- 
half of America, but in behalf of speculative companies in 
England. Out of that fact chiefly came all the failures. 
Because of that fact mainiy, the successes achieved were 
slow of accomplishment and narrowly missed failure. 

King James, who had succeeded Elizabeth on the 
throne, chartered two companies to colonize what was 
then called Virginia — that is to say the region lying be- 
tween the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Car- 
ohna on the south and Newfoundland on the north. 
These companies were composed of merchants, specula- 
tors and adventurers. Their charters gave them per- 
mission to plant colonies anywhere they pleased within 
the territory indicated, subject only to certain limitations 
designed to prevent them from trespassing upon each 
other. The London Company was authorized to plant 



A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 15 

colonies anywhere between 34 and 41 degrees of north 
latitude, and the Plymouth Company anywhere between 
38 and 45 degrees. But in order to avoid conflict in 
their overlapping grants each company was forbidden to 
plant a colony within 100 miles of one already established 
by the other company. 

Spain claimed all of that territory and in spite of the 
crippling of Spain'» power, one of the elements of diffi- 
culty in planting colonies was still the problem of pro- 
tecting them against Spanish assault and destruction. 
But the " Sea Barons " of England had by this time 
pretty effectually checked and curbed the naval power of 
Spain and so the problems involved in colonizing were 
somewhat simplified. 

Several abortive attempts were made to plant colonies 
under these and other charters. In 1602 a shipload of 
people were landed on the Massachusetts coast with in- 
tent "to leave them there and found a settlement, but 
the men who were assigned to be left revolted and went 
back to England on the ships that had brought them out. 

In another case — in 1607, the year in which James- 
town was settled — the Popham colony was established 
on the coasts of Maine and for a time it seemed to give 
promise of permanency. But in the end that enterprize 
also was abandoned and so it was the settlement at James- 
town, in 1607, that constituted the first permanent Eng- 
lish colony on these shores. 

Near the end of 1606 the so-called London Company, 



16 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



otherwise known as the Virginia Company, seriously set 

to work to plant a colony in America. It sent out a 

company, numbering, by 

different accounts, from 

105 to 120 or more men, 

without a woman among 

them. And these men 

were wholly unskilled in 

the work they were sent 

out to do. 

Five-sixths of them were 




English Explorations in North America to 1607. 

men without any skill in any sort of labor, or any experi- 
ence in work. The other sixth included a few me- 
chanics, a barber, and some other people of possible use- 
fulness in the colony. But there were no farmers, no 
enterprizing seekers after fortunes that might be won 



A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 17 

in a rational way and no persons who were fit to render 
the services needed by way of building up an empire in 
the wilderness. 

It seems inconceivable to us now that such a company 
should have been sent out upon such a mission. The 
one problem presented to these men was to fell trees, 
open lands, plough fields and grow crops in a rich soil 
and a peculiarly favorable climate. A company of a 
little over one hundred fit men intent upon such pur- 
poses as these would quickly have made a prosperous 
settlement in that James River country in which the first 
permanent English colony in America was planted. But 
these were not the sort of men to achieve anything of 
that kind. They were idlers for the most part, men alto- 
gether unaccustomed to work, and for the rest they were 
the failures and the offscourings of the turbulent times in 
Britain. Some of them were criminals. They came 
to these shores filled with absurd dreams of the quick 
accumulation of gold. They had been told, upon what 
they accepted as authority, that in this western land 
gold was so plentiful that even kitchen utensils were 
made of it and they had not sense enough to understand 
that if such had been the case gold would have been of no 
more value than any base metal. 

Nothing was further from their minds than the doing of 
that one thing which it was necessary to do under the cir- 
cumstances ; the idea of work in the fields was not 
in their minds, while it was only by work in the fields 

B 



18 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

that there could be hope of building up here a prosper- 
ous community. 

If anything had been necessary to increase and em- 
phasize the conditions of failure in connection with such 
an expedition it was furnished by the scheme of govern- 
ment provided for the colonists. 

To begin with, in setting out to build up a civilization 
in a wilderness the colonists brought no wives or 
children with them. The whole idea of home making 
was excluded from their program. They were adven- 
turers pure and simple, crossing the ocean with the 
single thought of finding gold somewhere, filling their 
pockets with it, and going back to England to spend it 
in riotous living. 

The company which sent them out had as clearly 
absurd a purpose. Its first thought was to enrich itself 
by whatever might be found of value in America, and 
incidentally to build up a trade here as the East India 
Company had done in India. 

Under the scheme of government planned for the 
colony the king in England was in the last resort the 
sole legislator. The council of the company in Lon- 
don — subject only to the veto of the king — was abso- 
lute in its authority over the colony. 

The colony itself was to be directly governed by an 
entirely arbitrary commission appointed by the council 
of the company in London. N(^ provision whatever was 
made that any man should own the land he tilled or 



A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 19 

anything else. Nothing whatever was done to induce 
men to work. Nothing was done to call into play that 
personal endeavor for personal benefit which lies at the 
base of all human activity and all human prosperity. 

It was decreed that all the lands and all the proceeds 
of them and of labor on them should be held by the 
company in London, and that every man should be sup- 
ported out of a common fund. 

The result was that from the beginning there was no 
adequate common fund because no man cared to work 
to create it. Not many men will work under such con- 
ditions ; certainly not many of such men as were sent 
out to plant the earliest permanent English colony in 
America. 

But one good thing, of lasting advantage, was done in 
sending out the earliest colonists to America. In the 
first charters, those of Gilbert and Raleigh, and in the 
later Virginia Company's charter there was written a 
stipulation that the colonists should have all " the privi- 
leges of free citizens and persons native of England, in 
such ample manner as if they were born and personally 
resident in our said realm of England." 

That stipulation proved ultimately to be the great 
charter of American liberty. It was to that, from be- 
ginning to end, that the colonists appealed in all their 
struggles against oppression. It was on that basis, two 
centuries later, that the men of Massachusetts, and the 
men of New York, and the men of Virginia, revolted 



20 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

and made war. It .was in memory of that, that the 
Declaration of Independence was written. It was out 
of that principle that the American colonies grew at last 
into a nation. 

Ideas rule the world. Principles govern always in 
the end — the decrees of despots, dictators and parlia- 
ments to the contrary notwithstanding. 

This clause was hghtly written into Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert's first charter by a queen who would have over- 
ridden it, as jauntily as she prescribed the dress of men 
and women at her court, if occasion to override it had 
arisen. But as such occasion did not arise during her 
reign or during that of her immediate successors the 
principle survived, took root and grew. 

When the time came for American men to assert 
that principle, it was of far too vigorous a growth to be 
uprooted by any royal decree, or by any act of any par- 
liament on earth. 



CHAPTER II 

A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 

THE colony which was destined to make the first 
permanent Enghsh settlement in America, sailed 
from London in December, 1606, in three little 
ships, not one of which would now be regarded as fit to 
cross the Atlantic, especially during the tempestuous 
winter months. 

They were so unfit indeed, that it took them six weeks 
to get beyond sight of the English coast, and during 
those six weeks of course the colonists were eating up 
the provisions which were intended to feed them after 
their landing in America. 

They made this matter worse by going far out of their 
way after the foolish fashion of that time. Instead of 
sailing straight across the ocean, they went down to the 
Canary Islands, and thence by way of the West Indies, 
thus wasting time and needlessly consuming their sup- 
plies. These were blunders of course, but they were 
small blunders in comparison with others that were made 
in those times in the conduct of every enterprize of mo- 
ment. 

Instead of organizing the expedition before it set out 

21 



22 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



and placing it from the first under the control of the men 
who were to govern the colony, the company in London 
sent the motley crew to sea with a sealed box which con- 
tained the names 
of the counselors 
or governors, but 
which they were 
under orders not 
to open until 
they should land 
in Virginia. 
Thus absolutely 
nothing could be 
done during the 
long voyage in 
the way of or- 
ganizing the col- 
ony, assigning 
each man to his 
duty, or making 
preparations for 
success after 
landing. 

Even the cap- 
tains of the ships 
that carried the 
company, did not know on what part of the coast they 
were to land. They had a vague notion of Roanoke 







First settlement in Virginia. 



A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 23 

Island — the locality of Raleigh's unsuccessful efforts — as 
a proper destination, but they sailed along up the coast, 
missing that part of it, and at last passing into the mouth 
of Chesapeake Bay. 

Thence they pushed their way past Old Point Com- 
fort, through Hampton Roads, and up the James River. 

It was spring now and all nature was abloom. The 
supplies of food which the ships carried had been very 
seriously depleted during the voyage, and it would take 
a very long time for the ships to go back to England and 
bring over a fresh supply. 

Obviously the thing now to be done was to go ashore 
somewhere as quickly as possible and plant a food crop 
before it should be too late. The Indians had corn and 
peas and beans and squashes and pumpkins growing in 
all their fields along the rivers, and the sight of those 
fields should at once have suggested planting to the 
colonists. They need not have waited to select a per- 
manent site for their colony. All they had to do was to 
find a spot where they could land and plant corn ; the 
work of exploration could wait. 

They did nothing of the kind. They wasted all that 
was left of the already belated seedtime in voyages up 
and down the many rivers of that region, and, finally, 
when it was too late in the year to plant a crop with 
any hope of its ripening before the autumn frosts, they 
selected for their landing place almost the worst spot in 
all that region. It was a low-lying peninsula, connected 



24 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

with the mainland by a still lower-lying isthmus which 
has since been washed away, leaving the site an island. 

The spot was malarious in the extreme, as unhealthful 
a place as could have been found in eastern Virginia, 
and as quinine was then unknown, the colonists had no 
means of combating the fevers of the swamp in which 
they had ignorantly established themselves. 

There were only two things to be said in favor of the 
site on which the colonists landed and founded James- 
town. One was that the place was easily defensible 
against possible enemies ; the other was that the water 
along the shores was deep enough to permit the ships to 
come up to the land and be tied there to trees. This 
last was the lazy man's argument ; it spared some 
trouble ; otherwise it was utterly unimportant. The 
other reason counted for little. There was no real 
occasion to fear Spanish attacks. The Indians in that 
region showed no signs of hostility at first, and even had 
they done so, the windings of those rivers afforded 
many more healthful sites than that of Jamestown, 
which were quite as easily defensible as that. In the 
end indeed, the site of Jamestown became a point pecul- 
iarly hard to defend, by reason of its woodlands, afford- 
ing cover to an enemy, and still more by reason of its 
miasms which laid low the men depended upon for its 
defence. At one time almost all the men of the colony 
were prostrated by swamp fevers and it was impossible 
to maintain an efficient guard. 



A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 25 

When the colonists at last settled there, too late in 
the year to plant a crop for their own sustenance, there 
was nothing left to them except to hope that Captain 
Newport, who had brought them out, might be able to 
go to London again with his ships and bring back a 
supply of provisions in time to save them from starv- 
ing to death. Newport reckoned that he might, with 
good luck, be back again within about twenty weeks. 
But the food supplies of the colonists were barely enough 
to support them for fourteen weeks. The six weeks 
extra time promised to be amply sufficient for the star- 
vation of the whole company. 

Without doubt that is what would have happened but 
for John Smith. Whatever other doubts skeptical his- 
torians may entertain concerning that wonderful man's 
career, there is nowhere any question that he saved the 
Jamestown colony from a fate like that which had pre- 
viously blotted out the colony on Roanoke Island. 

In that sealed box which contained the names of the 
men who were to rule the colony, John Smith's name 
appeared as one of the chosen. But during the voyage 
and long before the box was opened, a quarrel arose 
between Smith and the others and Smith was even put 
into irons as a malefactor. So when the colony landed 
and the sealed box was opened, the others refused to 
let Smith take any part in their counsels. After a while 
he compelled them to give him a hearing before a jury, 
and as he was promptly acquitted of all the charges 



26 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

against him, he took his place as one of the men set to 
rule the colony. 

This was fortunate for the colony. Smith was the 
only man there who had sense enough to manage affairs 
well, the only man of them all who could have prevented 
the entire company from starving to death. As soon as 
he came into his share of authority he wisely usurped 
pretty nearly the complete control and nothing could 
have been better for the common interest. 

There was not food enough to last, on short allow- 
ance, till the ships could go to England and bring out 
further supplies. The colonists had planted no crops. 
They had set up a church and they had made a bowling 
green in the center of their little town for their amuse- 
ment, but they had done absolutely nothing in the way 
of providing food for their coming necessities. They 
had not even begun to clear the land. They recklessly 
traded away to the Indians such farming implements as 
they owned, and they remained as absolutely idle as if 
there had been a beneficent government behind them, 
able and willing to supply all their wants without any 
effort on their part. 

Smith alone seems to have foreseen the result of all 
this. He set to work to get food from the Indians, and 
he got it. He took great risks in his explorations, and 
often his life was in serious danger. But he knew how 
to deal with savages and other strange people, and with 
almost nothinjr to offer them in exchange for their grain 



A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 27 

he managed to get enough corn to keep the colonists 
alive. 

All this is a surprising story. What did these men 
expect.-^ Why did they not realize their perilous con- 
dition ? Why did they not set to work with energy and 
courage, as men so placed usually do, to avert the fear- 
ful danger that menaced them ? Another thing, why 
should men starve in such a region .? They had wasted 
the seedtime, it is true ; they had planted no corn ; 
but the woods in Virginia were full of game and the 
waters full of edible fish, oysters, crabs and the like, 
while every bay and inlet was covered at certain seasons 
by vast flocks of waterfowl. Why did not these men — 
to use a biblical phrase — "arise, slay, and eat .? " 

Even now, after nearly three hundred years of agricul- 
ture in those regions, no man of ordinary energy need 
starve there, even though he have no crop of any kind to 
depend upon. In the early part of the seventeenth century 
the woods abounded in deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, opos- 
sums, raccoons and innumerable hares. The bays were 
full of ducks and other waterfowl. The marshes were 
populous with wild birds of a score of varieties, all easily 
taken by the rudest kind of trapping. In the waters 
there were mountainous banks of oysters, with fish in 
such abundance that the Indians were accustomed to 
gather and dry a whole year's food supply in the spring. 
This was the fishing season, too, when the Indians were 
taking great numbers of shad and gigantic sturgeon and 



28 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

limitless supplies of lesser fish. It was the season, also, 
when soft crabs abounded and were easily taken by the 
very rudest appliances. Later in the year — in September 
— came the sora in such multitudes, and so helpless from 

their excessive fat- 
ness that they 
might be knocked 
down with sticks or 
paddles. Yet in 
the midst of such 
abundance this 
strangely unfit col- 
ony, crippled by 
their inexperience 
in colonizing and 
by their ignorance 
of the land they 
had been sent out 
to settle, sat down 
to await the uncer- 
tain coming of 
food ships from 
London, and even 
after two other 
planting seasons had gone by they actually starved. 
They did indeed at one time of severe starvation exile 
a part of the company to the oyster banks for suste- 
nance but at no time do they appear to have made any 




Present appearance of Jamestown. 



A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 29 

systematic and well-ordered efforts to use the food that 
lay so abundantly at hand. 

So long as John Smith remained in control they had 
food. For Smith went among the Indians and bought 
corn. But when at last Smith returned to England, 
there was nobody in the colony with sense enough and 
energy enough to do this, and the " starving time " 
came. The story of that belongs to a later chapter. 
But why the colonists did not feed fat from the forest 
and the stream in a land of such abundance, must always 
remain a problem of history. 



CHAPTER III 

JOHN SMITH 

IT must be borne in mind that the Indians with whom 
the Jamestown colonists at first came into relations 
were not at all such savages as those encountered by 
later colonists in other parts of the country. Indeed they 
were not savages at all in any just sense of the term. 
They had an orderly life of their own. They were un- 
der government. They clothed themselves, so far at 
least as decency required. Up to the age of twelve 
years the children went naked. After that they wore 
clothes. 

These Indians provided for their necessities in per- 
fectly orderly ways, and far more discreetly than the 
colonists did. They cultivated fields. Having killed 
the trees of a forest by cutting a girdle in the bark of 
each, they stirred up the earth with such rude tools as 
they possessed, and planted corn, beans, peas, squashes, 
pumpkins and the like in great abundance. The Indians 
were so far savages that they left all this work to their 
womenkind — their squaws. But they were so far civ- 
ilized that their necessities were met by agricultural 
work. 

30 



JOHN SMITH 



31 




Indian Houses in the Village of Secotan. 

(From the original drawing by John White, artist to the Raleigh 

Expedition.) 



32 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

While the squaws were thus tilHng the ground the 
Indian men fished the streams and laid by a great store 
of dried fish to furnish food during the brief winter 
months of Virjjinia. 

o 

Once a year, also, the tribes — men, women and chil- 
dren — went away to the woodland on the annual hunting 
expedition, from which they brought back abundant sup- 
plies of provisions — deer meat, bear meat, the dried flesh 
of opossums, raccoons, squirrels, wild turkeys and the like. 

Land was abundant and superabundant in Virginia. 
Not only so, but land prepared for cultivation might have 
been had by the colonists in exchange for a few trinkets. 
The Indians had opened many fields on the margins of 
all the rivers by girdling the trees in the way already 
described. Many of these fields were not in use when 
the colonists landed. If the men of Jamestown had 
been governed by ordinary common sense they would 
have hired some of the unused fields, planted crops there 
and fared abundantly. 

In brief, in a remarkably fertile country, these peo- 
ple idly waited for a company in London to send them 
something to eat across three thousand miles of tempes- 
tuous sea, at a time when sailing ships alone existed, and 
when the knowledge of the navigators was so meager and 
defective that it was never certain that they would reach 
the coast within a hundred miles of the point intended, 
or that they would know where they were when they did 
make land. 



JOHN SMITH 



33 



As there were no women or children in Jamestown, 
there was of course no home Hfe there. The company 
in London owned everything, inchiding the proceeds of 
every man's labor. No man was permitted — for some 
years at least — to own the land he tilled or even the 
crop that he might produce. Consequently no man had 
any inducement to work, and in fact no man worked. 
Why should he .? Having 
no family to provide for, 
having no property of his 
own to improve, having no 
future of betterment to 
look for, why should any 
man in the colony — most 
of them unused to work at 
any time — exert himself 
to produce crops that he 
could not own or to create 
a prosperity which he 
could not share ? Why 
not play at bowls instead 
and idle away the time in 

a delicious climate, trusting John Smith to get him some- 
thing to eat by trading with the Indians ? 

John Smith did this in a masterly manner. He was a 

young man of extraordinary vigor and unusual sagacity. 

He had been an adventurer in many parts of the world. 

His personal history was so wonderful that many histo- 

c 




Capt. John Smith. 



34 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

rians in our time are disposed to doubt its more adven- 
turous details. But in view of what he certainly did for 
the Jamestown colony, and in view of his really remark- 
able explorations in America, which extended even to 
New England, the better opinion seems to be that in the 
main John Smith's story of his own life was true. 

Professor John Fiske has pointed out that the strangest 
and least credible of Smith's previous adventures in for- 
eign countries were first reported not by himself but by 
others, in official records and in books written by those 
who knew the facts, for circulation in countries with 
which Smith had no relations whatsoever. 

Doubtless John Smith was something of a braggart. 
Doubtless he liked to make his stories of adventure as 
striking and as dramatic as he could. But there is at 
least room for the opinion that his account of himself, of 
his adventures, and of his deeds of prowess, is substan- 
tially true. Very certainly he saved the first English 
colony in America by his energy, his daring and his sa- 
gacity, and nothing worse ever happened to that colony 
than the physical injury to him by an accidental explosion 
of gunpowder, which compelled him to return to Eng- 
land. Fortunately that did not happen till the colony 
had passed its first state of greatest danger and difficulty. 
It is not too much to say that English civilization and 
the English power were first planted on this continent 
by the genius, the courage and the abounding energy of 
Captain John Smith. 



JOHN SMITH 35 

His passion for exploration was limitless. His mind 
was a very corkscrew in its search for information. 
His resourcefulness was extraordinary. In all times 
of danger he knew' what to do. His tact was illimit- 
able. His persuasiveness overcame all difficulties, con- 
quered all hatreds and secured to him whatever he 
wanted. 

His first task upon coming into authority in Virginia 
was to reduce the colonists to something like discipline. 
His next endeavor was to procure food for them from 
the Indians. After that, or incidentally to it, he gave 
himself up to the work of exploring the land in which he 
lived. In an open boat he sailed up and down all the 
multitudinous waterways of that region — the Chesapeake, 
the James River, the York, the Pamunkey, the Chicka- 
hominy, the Appomattox, the Potomac, the Rappahan- 
nock, the Rapidan and all the rest. Afterwards he sailed 
northward, exploring the coast all the way to the neigh- 
borhood of the mouth of the St. Lawrence. 

Now suppose this wonderful man did He a little, or 
exaggerate a little in telling of his early adventures in 
slaying Turks, or in describing his experiences in the serv- 
itude into which he certainly was sold as a captive. 
There is absolutely no proof that he told anything but 
the truth on those subjects. But even if his tales of ad- 
venture were all fabrications there remains the fact that 
he, first of all men, made the English colonization of 
these shores a fact, and he alone explored and mapped 



36 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

the coast in a way to render future and further settle- 
ment possible. 

In spite of all criticism and all detraction, the fame of 
John Smith endures as that of the man who did more 
than any other one man to make English colonization in 
America possible. 



CHAPTER IV 

LIFE IN JAMESTOWN 

HALF the Jamestown colonists died during that first 
year, and no wonder. They lived in unwholesome 
hovels, some of them in holes dug in the ground. 
They had utterly insufficient food, until Smith came into 
control, and the only wonder is that any of them lived 
through that terrible time. 

One of Smith's first services was in teaching them 
how to build healthful dwelling places for themselves. 
His second service was in procuring food for them, as 
we have seen. This he did at great personal risk, sailing 
up into the Indian country even after the colonists 
had needlessly offended the Indians and made enemies 
of them. There he exchanged trinkets for corn with 
which to keep the colonists alive. 

At one time he was made prisoner and condemned to 
death by the great chief, Powhatan. But by mingled 
boldness and persuasiveness he had won such favor with 
the Indians, in spite of the wrongs done them by the 
Jamestown colonists, that he was at last released. A 
long time afterward he told the story that Pocahontas, 
an Indian girl, the daughter of Powhatan, had savpd his 

37 



38 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



life by throwing her arms about his neck at the moment 
when the fatal blow was about to descend upon his head. 
Some historians have doubted the truth of this story be- 
cause Captain Smith did not tell it for some years after- 
ward. But in the same way he did not tell the story 
of his three encounters with Turks, or of his romantic 
escape from Turkish slavery until long after other and 

quite disinterested men 
had related the facts in 
printed books with 
which he had nothing 
whatever to do. 

Moreover it is not 
certain that Captain 
John Smith did not tell 
the story in the first 
book he wrote about 
Virginia, called " True 
Relation." That book 
was edited in London 
on behalf of the com- 
pany, and it is defi- 
nitely known that the 
work as published did not include all that Captain Smith 
wrote into it. The company in London was at that time, 
as we know, exceedingly anxious to publish nothing that 
might tend to discourage emigration to Virginia. It is 
altogether reasonable to suppose that the story of Smith's 




Indian kindling fire. 



LIFE IN JAMESTOWN 39 

capture and condemnation to death was cut out of the 
book as something that might discourage men from emi- 
grating to the colony. There is certainly no absolutely 
necessary or conclusive reason for discrediting a romantic 
legend which perfectly accords with Indian custom, and 
which some at least of our later historians have accepted 
as fact. 

In the spring of 1608 — a year after the founding of the 
colony, and again in the autumn of that year, ships ar- 
rived from England, bringing food supplies and more 
colonists, mainly of the same sort as those that had come 
out in the first instance. In 1609 still more colonists 
were sent out in nine ships. The men they brought to 
Virginia were in large part artisans, and fit colonists. 
Others of them, a minority perhaps, were thieves, vaga- 
bonds, broken-down ''gentlemen," footpads, worthless 
idlers who must be fed but who would not work. Two 
women, the first in the colony, came out in 1608. 

Strangely enough the ships brought out very little in 
the way of farm implements that could aid the colonists 
in growing food for themselves. There was not a plough 
in all America then. There is no trustworthy evidence 
that there was a hoe or a spade. Certainly there were 
no horses, no oxen, no cows, no hogs, no sheep, no goats, 
no domestic animals of any kind until more than a year 
after the first settlement was made. 

Even yet the colonists had not awakened to the obvious 
fact that by cultivating the rich soil of the country to 



40 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

which they had come they might provide themselves with 
all the food they needed and to spare. 

They let a second and a third seedtime go by almost 
unimproved, while they attended church and played bowls 
upon the green. Meanwhile they had found in the river 
sands a multitude of glittering mica scales which they 
mistook for gold. In our time a few ounces of such 
sand would be sent to a chemist for analysis. Within a 
few days the chemist would report that these glittering 
scales were nothing more than mica. But in the early 
part of the seventeenth century there was no such science 
as chemistry known in all the New World. There was no 
possible way in which the colonists at Jamestown could 
find out that the glittering particles they found in their 
river sands were not gold but fragments of mica slate. 

So the colonists, instead of growing golden grain that 
would have fed and rapidly enriched them, spent their 
time in freighting ships with a wholly worthless sand 
that glittered but was not gold. 



CHAPTER V 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 



THE expedition sent out to reinforce the colony in 
1609 was commanded by Sir Thomas Gates and 
Sir George Somers. Two of the nine ships com- 
posing the flotilla were wrecked in the Bermudas and 
when the rest of the fleet went on, both Gates and Som- 
ers, with a large number of the emigrants, remained be- 
hind in those islands until spring. 

This was unfortunate for the colony in several ways, 
for both Somers and Gates had a certain capacity to 
command and were possessed, at least, of moderate com- 
mon sense, while those who went forward were led by old 
enemies of Captain John Smith who were disposed to give 
him all the trouble they could in the colony. Unfortu- 
nately for the enterprise. Smith was presently so severely 
injured by an accident that he had to return to England, 
and, in the absence of Gates and Somers, there was no 
leader at Jamestown capable of providing food and pre- 
serving the integrity of the colony. 

The first necessity under such circumstances was to 
keep on good terms with the Indians, but instead of that 

41 



42 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



the new leaders established the worst possible relations, 
driving the Indians into active hostility. The result was 
that Jamestown was kept continually in a state of siege, 
the savages lying in ambush near the settlement and kill- 
ing every colonist who ventured to show himself beyond 

the limits of the 
little town. 
The supply of 
corn was cut 
off of course 
and in the 
spring famine 
set in. Still 
worse, the men 
of Jamestown, 
already ague 
smitten, had to 
pass their nights 
_____^ out of doors on 

Virginia by the charter of 1609. P"uard in a DCS- 

tilential atmosphere. Most of them fell hopelessly ill, and 
the colony was reduced to the sorest straits. 

Jamestown had no resources of its own. Its people 
had even yet grown no grain of consequence. They had 
planted no fields and they had alienated the only people 
who could afford them succor. 

In their starving condition they killed and ate the few 
dogs, horses and brood animals that had at last been 




THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 43 

brought out from England and they were finally com- 
pelled to eat rats, mice and snakes by way of keeping 
themselves alive. They turned cannibals sometimes and 
ate dead Indians and even each other. Some of them 
escaped in a little boat and made their way back to Eng- 
land. Some were killed by the Indians ; still more of 
them perished by starvation and disease. 
There had been nearly five hundred men in 
the colony in the autumn of 1609. In 
May of 1 6 10, only sixty of them remained 
alive ; fever, Indians and starvation had de- 
stroyed the rest. 

But in May, Gates and Somers arrived 
with a supply of provisions brought from 
the Bermudas in two little boats which they 
had built there. These provisions consisted 
of salt pork, and dried birds, and turtles, but 
they were so scant in quantity that they 
could not be expected to feed the colony 
for more than a few weeks and now that War Club. 
the hostility of the Indians had been completely aroused 
there was no hope of any food supply from that source. 

The colonists had been at Jamestown for three full 
years. For three full years they had dwelt in a region 
fruitful in an extraordinary degree, and yet they had 
done absolutely nothing by way of growing food supplies 
for themselves or taking care of themselves. 

The situation was critical in the extreme, and Gates 



44 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

decided that the only way out of it was to embark all the 
people of the colony upon his little ships and endeavor to 
make his way to the fishing banks off Newfoundland, 
where English vessels lay, from which he hoped to ob- 
tain supplies of food. With the clumsy appliances of 
navigation then in use it was by no means certain that 
he could reach the Newfoundland banks before the people 
in his charge should starve to death. He decided upon 
this attempt, however, as the only thing that could be 
done with even a remote hope of rescuing the colo- 
nists. 

He had only four little pinnaces — mere open boats — 
and into these he crowded all the people and set sail, 
abandoning the settlement. This was in June, 1610. 
But before the little fleet had made its way down the 
river and through Hampton Roads to the sea, Lord De 
la Warr, who had been appointed governor of the colony, 
arrived at the mouth of the river just in time to prevent 
the final abandonment of the enterprise. 

In constant fear of an attack by the Spanish the colo- 
nists kept men posted at various points down the river 
to serve as lookouts. From these men De la Warr 
learned of the proposed abandonment of Jamestown, and 
he instantly set himself to prevent it. He sent a boat 
up the river and ordered the colonists back to James- 
town. A little later he reached that point himself with 
supplies of provisions, of which he had an abundance. 
Better still, so far as the colony was concerned, he had 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 



45 



the royal authority to declare martial law and to rule 
the settlement with an iron hand. 

He pointed out to the people their folly in not having 
cultivated the soil in order to provide themselves with 
food, and showed them that all their sufferings and star- 
vation were the result of their own idleness and their 
neglect of easy and obvious opportunities. 

But starvation, and expo- .. ^ 

sure, and malaria, had so far I 

fastened themselves upon the ' 

people that the illness and 
the deaths continued. Un- 
happily De la Warr himself 
was poisoned by the miasms 
of the unfit place. He fell 
ill and was compelled to re- 
turn to England. 

After his departure things 
went about as they had gone 
before, until the next year 
Sir Thomas Dale was sent 
over to take control. He was a man of strong arm and 
resolute mind. He ruled without mercy for the idle, 
without pity for the weak, without tolerance for any form 
of laziness and without any very great concern for the 
happiness of the people. He ruled the men of James- 
town as a master rules his slaves. It was his purpose to 
make the colony profitable to the company in London, 




Manner of boiling in an earthen 
pot. 



46 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

which had planted it as an investment for the sake of 
the money returns that might be squeezed out of it. But 
at any rate his rule was wholesome for the colony in cer- 
tain ways. He did not let the people starve and he 
compelled them to work — the one thing which they had 
neglected to do before, and their neglect of which was 
the chief cause of their misfortunes. 

But if we remember what sort of men composed the 
colony it is not difficult to understand that the tyranny 
of such a man as Dale drove many of the people to de- 
spair. Some of them fled to the woods, preferring to 
take their chances among the Indians rather than remain 
under so rigorous a government. When such runaways 
were caught Dale burned them at the stake or subjected 
them to other cruel forms of death. Others made efforts, 
some successful and some unsuccessful, to escape from 
the country in little boats. Dale's tyranny was the 
more intolerable for the reason that many men of fortune 
and gentle breeding had by this time come out to the 
colony. These were reduced to the com^mon slavery. 

At the bottom of all this trouble was the blunder of 
the Virginia Company in London in the original organiza- 
tion of the colony. If these people had been farmers, 
sent out to Virginia with their wives and children to 
make homes for themselves, and had been permitted to 
own their lands and their labor, to work for themselves 
and for the betterment of their condition, none of these 
troubles would have ensued. There were women in the 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 47 

colony after 1 609, but they were very few. The colonists 
had been promised indeed that after five years of work 
for the common fund they should be permitted to own 
their own lands and work for themselves ; but after 
seven years had passed this promise was still unfulfilled. 
It was still the fact that the industrious man had no ad- 
vantage over the idler and that no man had any induce- 
ment to work. The colonists were in fact in a condition 
of serfdom or worse. They were scarcely better than so 
many coolies working for a company without compensa- 
tion. 

Dale seems to have had some glimmering notion at 
least of the evil effects of this system, and in 16 14 he 
selected those of the colonists who had been longest in 
Virginia, and gave to each of them the use of three acres 
of land to be cultivated on private account. He gave 
them also the privilege of devoting thirty days in the 
year to the cultivation of their private crops, exacting in 
return eleven months of work at their hands for the 
"common stock." To a few he gave also one day in 
the week, from seedtime till harvest, for the tilling of 
their own little fields. 

But in making this small concession to the natural 
human impulse of personal possession and endeavor, he 
offset it by requiring these men to support themselves by 
their thirty days' work on three acres of land, without 
assistance from that common stock for which they were 
required to work eleven months out of every twelve, and 



48 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



of those to whom he allowed the one day a week he ex- 
acted a well-nigh ruinous rental of two and a half barrels 
of corn to the acre. 

It seems incredible that men who had hands, and fists, 
and brains, should have submitted to such a rule as this. 
The only explanation is found in the character of those 
men who were first sent out to Virginia, and in the spirit 
of submission to arbitrary authority which at that time 

strangely dominated 
the minds of men 
everywhere. Under 
similar circumstances 
in our time there would 
be a quick revolt and a 
successful one. Mod- 
ern men so placed and 
so oppressed would 
reason that the wilder- 
ness in which they 
lived belonged to them 
for use and they would 
seize upon it and use it for their own in spite of any and 
all orders that might come from across the sea. 

Nothing so sharply emphasizes the defective character 
of the men of Jamestown, and indeed all other men of 
that time, as does their submission to a tyranny so arbi- 
trary and so unjust under circumstances which they 
might so easily have controlled. 




Indian manner of broiling. 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY . 49 

Even this little concession, however, of three acres 
and thirty days in the year, improved the condition 
of the colony. At last men had some small interest 
and ownership in their own labor. Nevertheless the con- 
ditions of life were of the very worst, if we consider them 
with reference to any hope of the ultimate establishment 
and prosperity of the colony. There were still only a 
few women there. No man had a home of his own in 
which dwelt his wife and his little children. The blight 
of communism was over it all. Men did not own 
their fields, or control their labor, or reap the profits of 
it. They were simply slaves working for the company 
and under orders of a master. 

About this time another blunder was committed. To- 
bacco had become a peculiarly valuable commodity in 
Europe and the supply of it, up to this time, had come 
mainly from the West India Islands. The soil and cli- 
mate of Virginia were peculiarly well adapted to the 
profitable cultivation of that plant, and John Rolfe — the 
man who afterward married Pocahontas — saw it growing 
in the Indian fields. It occurred to him that there might 
be profit for the colony in growing it in the fields culti- 
vated for the company, and in private fields, for private 
ownership of the land was by that time extending. Its 
cultivation was introduced and rapidly increased. The 
yield was enormous and the prices high, while the 
price of grain was fixed by law — an error which gov- 
erning men had not at that time learned to avoid. It 

D 



50 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

presently happened therefore that all the labor of the 
colony was devoted to the cultivation of tobacco for 
shipment to England where it sold at high rates. The 
cornfields were abandoned and practically nothing was 
done to grow food for the colonists. In 1617 even 
the streets in Jamestown were planted with tobacco and 
every field that should have been bearing grain was de- 
voted instead to this money-yielding crop. The result 
of all this was that another starving time came — one 
scarcely less severe than that from which the colonists 
had already suffered. 

Another thing that stimulated the cultivation of to- 
bacco was that it passed current as money. As it was 
forbidden to carry gold and silver coin away from Eng- 
land, there was almost no money at all in the colony, and 
tobacco took its place — a currency uncertain of value, but 
at least possessed of great purchasing power. 

It was three or four years earlier than this that one 
Captain Argall bribed some Indians to deliver Poca- 
hontas, the daughter of Powhatan, into his hande. His 
thought was that if the colony could get possession of 
Powhatan's daughter the fact would serve as a basis of ne- 
gotiation with the Indians and might in that way allay 
somewhat the hostility of the red men. 

Pocahontas was probably a willing enough captive ; 
she had played among the whites in Jamestown in her 
childhood and had acquired a fondness for their life. 
She was now a young woman, reputed to be beautiful. 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 



51 



After a little while she consented to marry John Rolfe. 
She was first converted into a Christian by baptism and 
became the Lady Rebecca. 




Pocahontas. ( From engraving in first edition of John 
Smith's General History.) 

Her marriage took place in 1614 and two years later 
she went to England with her husband, and was received 
at court as a princess, though her husband was for a 
time threatened with pains and penalties for having mar- 



52 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

ried a royal princess — he being a commoner — without 
the permission of the sovereign. 

Pocahontas died in England leaving one son, a half- 
breed, from whom some of the greatest families in Vir- 
ginia are proud to claim their lineage. 

By this time the colony was slowly extending itself 
and receiving new immigrants of a better class than the 
first settlers. New fields were opened and cultivated 
outside of Jamestown and new settlements were made in 
various parts of the region round about. 

More important still the personal ownership of land 
had been by this time greatly extended so that industry 
was stimulated by the prospect of personal advantage 
from it. Even yet however the home-making instinct, 
which is common to all men, had not been permitted to 
exercise itself in any adequate way. There were still 
very few women in the colony and almost no children. 

After five years of Dale's government Captain Argall 
succeeded to the control of the colony. He was a man 
of enterprise and ability, and he had no conscience what- 
ever. He robbed the colony right and left, and defrauded 
the London Company in every way in which it was pos- 
sible to do so. He governed for his own profit exclu- 
sively and his government very nearly ruined the colony. 
His exactions were so great that men cultivating fields 
could not comply with them without suffering impover- 
ishment. 

But relief was coming. In 1618 the company in Eng- 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 53 

land which had control of this colony began to manifest 
an appreciation of its conditions. They organized aux- 
iliary societies to make settlements in Virginia. Within 
a year, under the auspices of those auxiliary societies, the 
white population in Virginia increased from less than 
four hundred to more than a thousand men. At the 
same time the Virginia Company in London granted to 
the colonists a charter which proved ultimately to be the 
foundation of American liberty. 

This document was called the " Great Charter." It 
decreed that there should be a governor and a council of 
state to be appointed by the company in England, but it 
provided also that there should be in Virginia a general 
assembly representing the people. It provided that each 
of the several settlements which had now been formed 
should elect two representatives, or burgesses as they 
were called, to represent it in this general assembly 
and that the assembly should enact all laws for the gov- 
ernance of the colony, subject only to the veto of the 
company. 

More important still the Great Charter provided for 
the general and complete private ownership of land. 
The company had at last come to understand that men 
could not be expected to cultivate fields if the produce 
of their labor at the end of the year was not to belong 
to them. It had at last come to understand that com- 
munism is and must be always and everywhere a failure. 
It had come to understand that personal interest and 



54 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

personal ambition are the moving forces of human en- 
deavor, and that the family is the foundation of all civili- 
zation — the unit of society. 

This Great Charter was the beginning of prosperity to 
English colonists in America. For the first time, and 
after eleven years of blundering experimentation, the 
facts of human nature were recognized and a common 
sense system was adopted. 

It was on July 30, 16 19, that the first General As- 
sembly met in the little church at Jamestown. This was 
the beginning of free, representative government in 
America. When other colonies were planted a little 
later, particularly in Massachusetts, this principle of local 
self-government by representation was fully recognized 
and out of it has grown, as we shall see in following the 
history of the colonies, all that we now know of " govern- 
ment of the people by the people for the people." 

By this time there had been a considerable importation 
of agricultural implements, which simplified the toil of 
the colonists and increased the productiveness of their 
fields. There had also been a considerable importation 
of farm animals — horses, cows and hogs. The forests of 
the country were so rich in mast that the hogs were able 
from the first to support themselves in the woodlands. 
They multiplied rapidly and vast numbers of them went 
wild in the swamps and other unoccupied lands, develop- 
ing presently into a new breed of swine which even to 
this time survives as the " razor-back " hog of Virginia 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 55 

from which comes a ham especially esteemed in our 
clay. These hogs lived healthfully in the woods upon 
nuts and roots, and their flesh attained a perfection of 
flavor which has been equalled nowhere else in the 
world. 

There was still one thing lacking in the Virginia col- 
ony. There were still very few women there. Conse- 
quently there were no homes and nothing to bind men 
to the soil by the love of family. 

In 1619 somebody connected with the London Com- 
pany had sense enough to see this defect in the system 
and to plan a way to correct it. He understood that 
men sent into the wilderness to build up a community 
there must have wives and homes of their own. He un- 
derstood that women only can make homes anywhere. 
This genius, whoever he was — and unfortunately his 
name is not recorded in history — suggested that a 
company of women should be sent out to Virginia to 
become wives to the men already settled there. 

The plan adopted was a simple one and entirely prac- 
ticable. Ninety young women of good character were 
induced to go out to the colony. They paid no fare for 
their transportation and they undertook no obligation 
whatsoever to marry anybody after they got there. The 
natural inclination of women toward men and of men to- 
ward women was trusted to arrange the rest of the pro- 
gram. It was planned that when these young women 
should land, the men of the colony should be free to 



56 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

woo them at their will. If any man secured the consent 
of any young woman to become his wife he was expected 
to pay the company in tobacco, as the currency of the 
country, the cost of her transportation across the ocean. 
Beyond that there was no charge and no obligation. 

Most of the ninety young women were quickly mated 
and the experiment was so successful that other importa- 
tions of women followed in rapid succession at a much 
higher rate of passage charge, and they found husbands 
anxious to pay the price and secure them as home makers 
in this American wilderness. The result of this experi- 
ment was to make permanent a colony which had before 
been of uncertain tenure, and to build up on these 
shores a state founded upon the natural relations of men 
and women. 

Now for the first time the Virginians came to feel 
that they had a country of their own to dwell in, and a 
life of their own to live. They had fields of their own 
to cultivate, with the assurance that the produce of them 
should redound to their own advantage and enrich them. 
They had homes of their own to love and to be happy 
in. They had wives and children of their own to pro- 
vide for by their industry and thrift. And now for the 
first time the colony in Virginia began to exist as an in- 
dependent community, relying upon itself for its own 
support and dependent upon its own exertions fcr its 
future welfare and happiness. For the first time in the 
history of this colony the fundamental forces of human 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 57 

nature were brought to bear to create prosperity and to 
insure success. 

It was at about this time that the great curse of 
America was born. In 1619 a Dutch ship entered the 
river carrying a few negro slaves who had been bought 
in the West Indies. The ship was short of food, and 
when its captain was forbidden to land he threatened to 
throw the negro slaves overboard rather than feed them. 
In order to prevent that inhumanity the Jamestown au- 
thorities agreed to buy these negroes. 

Let us understand this thing clearly. At that time 
the negro was nowhere regarded as the white man's 
brother. He was held to be merely a beast of burden 
capable of performing certain work and subject to pur- 
chase and sale as any other beast of burden might be. 
The people at Jamestown had not desired to. purchase 
negro slaves, but at the same time it did not come into 
the mind of any of them that the purchase or sale of 
negroes was in any wise a trespass upon the rights of 
humanity. It was very many years afterwards that this 
thought found a lodgment in the consciences of men. 

By this time the colony occupied with its plantations 
most of the peninsula between the James and the York 
Rivers and most of the region on the southern bank of 
the James River up to the present site of Richmond, 
and a greatly better class of men had come out to live 
in Virginia. 

Since the marriage of Pocahontas with John Rolfe the 



5S OUR FIRST CENTURY 

Indians had been in the main friendly and no serious 
troubles with them had occurred ; but about this time 
the Indian Emperor, Powhatan, who ruled over thirty 
tribes, died. His brother succeeded him as emperor 
and he was far less disposed than Powhatan had been to 
be friendly with the Englishmen. He was especially 
annoyed by the encroachments of EngHsh plantations 
upon territory which had been previously the hunting 
ground of his people. 

Presently a quarrel arose between one of the settlers 
and an Indian. Out of it almost instantly grew an 
attack upon all the settlements by all the Indians. This 
was in 1622. The attack was made without warning 
and many of the white men were killed in their fields, 
brained with their own implements of industry. The 
butchery included men, women and children, and in a 
single day nearly one-tenth of all the colonists were 
slaughtered. 

A bloody war ensued which ended at last in the com- 
plete subjugation of the savages. For twenty years 
after that there was no further trouble between the 
Indians and the white men. 

It was not the king in England who granted the 
great charter of 1618 to Virginia but the company, 
which, under the king's authority had a right to grant 
it. But in 1624, the king quarreled with the company 
and appealed to the courts to annul its own charter. 
This was done. But the annulment of the company's 



THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 59 

charter, the Virginians contended, did not invahdate the 
charter granted by it to the Virginia colony while its 
authority still existed. 

A little later the king sent out commissioners to Vir- 
ginia to inquire as to the affairs of the colony, but the 
assembly resolutely refused to permit his agents to ex- 
amine their records, and when the clerk of the house of 
burgesses permitted the commissioners to see them, he 
was sentenced to stand in the pillory and to have a 
part of his ears cut off as a penalty. Thus early in the 
history of the colony did the colonists assert their rights 
as Englishmen and combat the king himself in that 
behalf. 

In addition they adopted a resolution that no taxes 
should ever be levied upon the colony, or the people of 
the colony, without the consent of the people's own 
representatives. This was in effect the early beginning 
of that revolution which ultimately made of the colonies 
free and independent states. It was the assertion of 
the exclusive right of EngUshmen in America to tax 
themselves and it was in assertion of that right chiefly 
that the revolutionary war was waged a century and 
a half later. It is to be borne in mind, as has been 
said earlier in this volume, that ideas govern the world, 
and this idea that taxation of the colonies by any author- 
ity outside of the colonists themselves could be, should 
be, and must be resisted and resented, was born as early 
as 1624 in the Virginia plantations. It was a seed 



60 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

planted in fertile soil, and it was destined to bear rich 
fruit. 

In the next year King James died and was succeeded 
by Charles I. The colonists, who hoped if possible to 
live on good terms with the English government, sent 
ex-Governor Yeardley to England with assurances of 
their loyalty and with protestations that they desired 
no change in their government as it then existed. The 
king made a knight of Yeardley and sent him back in 
1626 as the royal governor, at the same time recog- 
nizing the right of the people to make their own laws 
through their house of burgesses and themselves alone 
to determine what taxes should be levied upon them. 

If we are to understand the origin and the birth of 
American liberty and of our own system of government 
as it exists to-day we must bear these facts in mind. 
They were the seeds from which our liberty has grown. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 

IT was about fourteen years after the settlement at 
Jamestown was made that the first permanent New 
England colony was planted at Plymouth in Massa- 
chusetts. The circumstances which gave birth to that 
settlement were totally different from those that had in- 
spired the Virginia enterprise, and the settlement was 
made under much more hopeful conditions. The Ply- 
mouth colony was not a body of men sent out to exploit 
the country in the interest of an English company but 
was instead a body of earnest men and women who came 
to this country of their own accord in order that they 
might better themselves. 

At that time religious persecution was common every- 
where in a degree which we in our more enlightened 
time can scarcely at all understand. Men of each faith 
thought it entirely right and proper to persecute, even 
unto death, the men who differed with them in religious 
belief. Roman Catholics persecuted all Protestants and 
Protestants, wherever they were in control of the gov- 
ernment, persecuted all Roman Catholics. More than 

61 



62 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

this, Protestants of one kind persecuted Protestants of 
another kind, while all of them persecuted Jews, Quakers, 
Baptists and all unbelievers. The general thought seems 
to have been that the man whose belief differed from 
that of the dominant party was a man to be outlawed or 
destroyed. In our day it is difficult to understand all 
this and yet it must be understood if we would read 
aright the history of that time. 

In England there were many people who objected to 
the forms and ceremonies of the state church and who ob- 
jected also to its methods of church government. These 
people wished to reform the ceremonies, to change some- 
what the teachings of the estabhshed church and gener- 
ally to alter church methods. They 
held that the ceremonies of the church 
had become too formal and mean- 
ingless and that personal religion 
played too small a part in the worship. 
They wanted to get rid of formalism, 
and to introduce what they regarded 
as a more vital, more exacting and 
more personal interest in religion in 

Puritan Gentleman. j^g stead. 

These people were called Puritans. It was not their 
purpose to withdraw from the established church. They 
desired only to reform it, to change its methods, to mod- 
ify its ceremonies, and to introduce into it ideas of their 
own. In all this they were stoutly resisted and in con- 




FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 63 



sequence they were subjected to a certain measure of 
persecution. 

There was another group of men and women who 
went much further than this in their opposition to what 
they beheved to be wrong in the estabhshed church. 
These people withdrew from the church itself and set up 
a church of their own in antagonism to it. They were 
called Separatists, because they had separated themselves 
from the Church of England. 

At the little town of Scrooby in the 
north of England there was a very ear- 
nest and active congregation of these 
Separatists. They presently found 
themselves subject to so much perse- 
cution for their religion that they de- 
cided to leave the country, in search of 
a place where they might worship God 
in their own way without incurring pains 
and penalties of any kind. They emi- 
grated in a body to Leyden in Holland. 
There they lived for a little more than a dozen years, 
enjoying perfect freedom of conscience and an absolute 
liberty to worship as they pleased and to teach their doc- 
trines without interference. 

At the end of that time, however, they had begun to 
see what must happen to them. They were still stoutly 
loyal to their English birthright and were in no way dis- 
posed to surrender it. They began to understand by 




Puritan Lady. 



64 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



that time that if they were to remain in Holland their 
children and their grandchildren would not be English- 
men but Dutchmen and they were very unwilling that 
this should occur. Their desire was to settle themselves 
somewhere in English territory where they might be free 
to hold their own religious views, at the same time main- 
taining their status as Englishmen. 




New England by the patent of 1630. (Vicinity of Boston.) 

It was in pursuit of this object that they made up their 
minds at last to emigrate to America. They went first 
to England where many others of their faith joined them 
and where they secured the privilege of settling within the 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 65 

American domain of the Virginia Company. They then 
set sail in the ship Mayflower and after a long and tem- 
pestuous voyage landed on the shores of Massachusetts. 

Like almost everything else that happened in connec- 
tion with the early colonies, their landing place was 
probably a blunder, though there is some authority for 
believing that the master of their ship had been bribed 
by men hostile to the Virginia Company to make this 
blunder. At any rate their landing place lay far north 
of the domain of the Virginia Company, in which alone 
they had Ucense to settle, and was in a region to which 
they had no charter right or title whatsoever. Never- 
theless they determined to land there, being ship weary 
and uncertain as to what might happen should they pro- 
long their voyage by running on down the coast into the 
region to which they had been assigned. 

There were one hundred and two persons in the emi- 
grant company all told. Most of these were Separatists 
but some of them were not. When it was decided to 
land on the New England coast outside the domain of 
Virginia, those who were not Separatists, but who had 
joined themselves to the colonists for purposes of their 
own, threatened that upon landing they would obey no 
rule in the absence of any right on the part of the colony 
to estabhsh laws and rules. In order to meet this situ- 
ation the Pilgrims gathered together before landing and 
drew up a compact. In this compact they agreed that 
they would enact from time to time such laws " as shall 
E 



66 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

be thought meet and convenient for the general good of 
the colony." Before landing they required that every- 
body on board should subscribe to this compact agreeing 
to give to the laws of the colony '' due submission and 
obedience." 

The point at which the Pilgrims landed had been dis- 
covered and named Plymouth by Captain John Smith of 
Virginia in one of his indefatigable voyages of discovery 
up and down the American coast. The Pilgrims ac- 
cepted and retained the name as it was recorded in Smith's 
rough map of the Cape Cod region. 

The climate of Massachusetts of course was far less 
malarious than that of Virginia, but in winter it was ex- 
cessively cold and the Pilgrims knew as little as the Vir- 
ginia colonists had known of how to meet the climatic 
conditions of America and how to live healthfully in the 
midst of them. 

The long confinement on board the little ship had of 
course weakened many constitutions and as the landing- 
was made in December there was a long winter to be 
endured by these weakened ones. Their hastily con- 
structed habitations were utterly unfit to resist the rigors 
of a New England winter, and some of them continued 
to live on board the ship. 

Nearly all of the colonists fell ill during that season 
and before the end of it came, forty-four out of the one 
hundred and two were dead. Six more died soon after- 
ward, among them the governor, John Carver. 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 



67 



Another difficulty encountered by the Plymouth col^ 
onists was the intense hostility of the Indians near them. 
This hostility was due mainly to the fact that, a little 
while before, an English ship captain had captured and 
carried to England a number of the savages. 

The first Virginia colonists had landed in the spring- 




Chair of Carver, first governor of Plymouth Colony, 
time when it was possible to plant crops with the hope 
of an early harvest — an opportunity which they fool- 
ishly neglected. The Pilgrims landed instead in De- 
cember and many months must elapse before they could 
even make a beginning of cultivation. They were com- 
pelled to live during all those weary weeks of winter upon 



68 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

such food stuffs as they had brought with them in the 
good ship Mayflower except that they secured some 
small supplies of corn in addition and did some fishing. 
In order to understand how meager these food stuffs 
must have been we must remember that there was at 
that time no such thing as a refrigerator for the preserva- 
tion of meats ; that the art of preserving fruits, and veg- 
etables, and meats in tin or glass cans was wholly un- 
known ; and that provisions preserved for a long voyage 
consisted solely of salted meats, hardened in brine until 
they were almost inedible, and of such vegetable products 
as dried beans and the like. Upon such food sup- 
plies as these the Pilgrims must live not only during the 
winter but during all those months of spring and summer 
which must elapse before their crops, planted in the 
spring, should bear fruit. Such living was exceedingly 
hard and in many ways unwholesome. They had no 
fresh meats, no vegetables, no fruits. They must simply 
subsist as best they could upon stale and unwholesome 
ship stores. 

In the spring two friendly Indians came into the set- 
tlement and took up their abode with the Englishmen. 
They knew how to live in that region and climate as the 
settlers did not and one of them taught the English- 
men many useful lessons. He taught them, among 
other things, how to catch fish in the bays round about. 
He taught them also what use to make of fish as ferti- 
lizers. He showed them how the Indians, when they 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 69 

planted corn in the rather thin soil of New England, 
enriched their fields by burying one or two or three dead 
fish in each corn hill as a means of stimulating the 
growth of the crops. 

In dealing with the Indians a little farther away the 
Pilgrims were very fortunate. These Indians belonged 
to the tribe called Wampanoags who were under the rule 
of Massasoit. Massasoit was from the first disposed to 
be friendly with the European newcomers. He made a 
treaty with them which secured peace during the next 
fifty-four years. 

This second successful EngHsh colony in America had 
one great advantage over the first. The men who came 
out with it had their wives with them. It was from the 
first a colony founded upon the home making idea. But 
those who governed it made the same fundamental mis- 
take that had been made in Virginia. They provided that 
all the colonists should work for a common fund and re- 
ceive their living from it. This paralyzed industry in Mass- 
achusetts precisely as it had paralyzed it in Virginia and 
as it must always paralyze it everywhere in the world 
where the communistic system is adopted. It resulted 
in Massachusetts, as it had resulted in Virginia, in fre- 
quent periods of famine. But the Massachusetts colo- 
nists were quicker than their Virginia predecessors to 
discover the cause of the dif^culty and in 1624 they 
allotted land to each of the colonists to be cultivated on 
his own account. From that time there was no further 



70 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

distress. As soon as every man knew that he must 
depend for his subsistence upon the labor of his own 
hands, every man worked with a will and the results 
were satisfactory. 

In the meanwhile other colonists were coming out 
from Holland and from England and in spite of the great 
mortality of that first winter, during which almost exactly 
one-half of the original settlers died, there were one 
hundred and eighty persons in the Plymouth colony in 
1624. 

After their settlement was made these colonists had 
received a patent from the council for New England, 
under which they had a title to live in the region in which 
they had established themselves, and under which they 
were granted lands to the extent of one hundred acres 
for each colonist settled there, and fifteen hundred acres 
of common lands for the public use, all rent free. 

Notwithstanding the treaty with Massasoit the Pil- 
grims had more or less trouble with the Indians round 
about them during all these years of the early colonial 
history. When they went to church they carried their 
firearms with them and at all times they were compelled 
to stand upon the defensive. They built a fort near 
their settlement, armed it with cannon and manned it 
daily and nightly as a defensive measure against possible 
Indian attacks. This constant necessity of standing on 
the defensive, was one of the reasons that led the New 
England colonists to live together in villages instead of 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 71 

living on widely separated farms, as the Virginians early 
began to do. 

The military commander at Plymouth was Captain 
Myles Standish. He was not an adherent of the religion 
of the colonists, but he personally liked the people and 
he took charge of their military operations with a thor- 
oughly good will. It is a curious fact that in a time 
when religion determined everything else this choice of 




The Myles Standish House, Duxbury, built by his son in 1666. 

a military leader was made without reference to religion 
and even in antagonism to the prevalent belief. Myles 
Standish knew how to do things and the colonists 
wanted things done. 

During the first half year, as we have seen, Governor 
Carver died and William Bradford, a young man only 
thirty-two years old, succeeded him. He governed so 
well that for the rest of his life he was always re-elected 



72 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

governor except upon one or two occasions when he re- 
fused to accept the office. 

The soil and cHmate of New England were totally 
different from those of Virginia. The woods in Massa- 
chusetts offered somewhat less in the way of game or 
food of any kind ready to man's use than did the forests 
in Virginia and by reason of Indian hostility hunting 
and trapping were more difficult. But fish were plenty 
and easily caught. 

The climate of New England was hostile and the soil 
irresponsive to easy cultivation. The colonists were 
able to grow corn, but their fields yielded but one bushel 
where the Virginia fields produced ten or more with 
even less attention to the crop. When hogs came 
into the colony they could not feed themselves as they 
did in Virginia, while running wild in the woods. The 
winters were long and severe. The summers were far 
less fruitful than in the southern climate. But the 
people of Plymouth were tirelessly industrious and by 
their industry they made good the difference between 
their sterile soil and their hostile climate on the one side 
and the more generous gifts of nature on the other. 
After the stupid communistic system was abandoned 
in Plymouth in 1624 there was enough to eat in every 
house, and little by little the people learned so to build 
and equip their houses as to make them habitable during 
the long and rigorous winters though, as there were then 
no stoves, it was impossible to make them comfortable. 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 73 



About this time another colony was attempted on the 
coast of New England. One John White, a Puritan 
minister in England, found his con- 
science greatly disturbed by the fact 
that many hundreds of men were 
going on fishing and trading vessels 
to New England and were left for 
many moons at a time without 
church privileges of any kind. In 
that age the question of church 
privileges was deemed one of vital 
importance. It was an age in 
which men, and especially Puritan 
men, were thinking far more of the 
life after death than of the life that 
now is. 

John White had learned that of 
the men sent out to fish on the 
coasts of Newfoundland and New 
England only a few were necessary 
to bring the cargoes back to Eng- 
land. The rest of them were free 
to remain on the coast and employ 
themselves during the winter in 
hunting, trapping, cutting timber 
and the like, while in the spring 
they might plant corn and cultivate 
crops until the fishing season should return again 




Sword of Myles Stan- 
dish, of ancient Persian 
manufacture. (In Pil- 
grim Hall, Plymouth, 
Mass.) 



It 



74 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

was John White's plan to establish a colony of these men 
on the New England coast, and place a minister among 
them to care for their souls. 

He interested the shipowners in his plan, and in 1625 
a little colony was estabhshed on Cape Ann. The ef- 
fort was a failure and three years later the last trace of 
the colony was obliterated. Most of the men had gone 
back to England aud the rest of them had settled at 
Naumkeag — afterwards called Salem. 

During all this time Puritanism had been spreading in 
England and at the same time Charles I, had come to 
the throne. Charles dickered with all religious factions, 
but he married a Catholic princess. He was in all ways a 
despot. Many things were done that offended the Puri- 
tans beyond endurance. Outraged in their tenderest 
religious sentiments these people by hundreds and almost 
by thousands went out to the Pilgrim colony rather 
than remain longer in England. 

In 1628 a new colony was formed for the further 
settlement of Massachusetts. This colony was sent out 
by what was later named the Massachusetts Bay Com- 
pany. That company bought land from the council for 
New England which was the successor of the Plymouth 
Company. The Massachusetts Bay Company was com- 
posed of shareholders and it received from the council 
for New England a grant of all the land between the 
Merrimac and the Charles Rivers and for three miles 
beyond each river with a westerly extension to the Pa- 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 75 

cific Ocean. In that time no one knew where the 
Pacific Ocean lay and it was the custom to grant lands 
from sea to sea, with a reckless indifference to future 
consequences, some of which ultimately proved to be 
serious. 

A few of John White's colonists still remained at the 
settlement of Naumkeag, or Salem, and thither the Mas- 
sachusetts Bay colonists went. The persecutions in 
England still continued and as a result of them the 
colony continued to increase in numbers by the coming 
out of new emigrants. 

In 1629 this Massachusetts Bay Company secured a 
charter from the king, giving it a right to govern any 
and all colonies that it might plant in America. There 
was nothing in this charter to secure free popular repre- 
sentative government to the people who should settle in 
America under its auspices, except a guarantee of their 
rights as Englishmen, which might be construed to give 
them a voice in their own government, but the Puritans 
in England were not satisfied that the seat of colonial 
government should be in the mother country. They 
therefore set their shrewd heads to work to turn the 
charter to account in behalf of free popular govern- 
ment. The charter stipulated that the company, which 
was supposed to reside in England, should govern the 
colonies planted by it, but there was absolutely nothing 
in the document to provide that the company should 
have its residence in England. In view of this the com- 



76 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



pany decided to change its place of meeting from Lon- 
don to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and to admit the 
people of the colony, in so far as they were members of 
the Puritan church, to membership in it. Thus the 
charter was transferred to America and became a char- 
ter of local self-government as the king had never in- 
tended that it should be. The peoj^le having become 

members of the com- 
pany had a right under 
the charter to govern 
the colony, that is to 
say, they thus acquired 
an absolute right of 
self-government. 

John Winthrop 
brought out the char- 
ter in 1630 and with it 
he brought a thousand 




John Winthrop. 



the colony. This was 
called the Great Mi- 
fifration. It was, in 



fact, only the beginning of the great immigration, for 
during the next ten years the population of the colony 
was swelled by not less than twenty thousand people 
who had fled from persecution in England to find liberty 
on this side of the ocean. 

The first site chosen for settlement was at Charles- 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 77 

town, where the water was shoal and where other incon- 
veniences existed. A clergyman named Blackstone was 
living at the time upon the present site of Boston where 
the water was deep, the harbor good, and where all 
other conditions favored the establishment of a prosper- 
ous colony. Upon his invitation the colonists removed 
from Charlestown and established themselves at Boston. 

Life in the colonies that now constitute Massachu- 
setts was still not at all what we should nowadays 
imagine. Crops were grown from the first and except 
for the little communistic experiment at Plymouth men 
in both the Massachusetts colonies were permitted from 
the beginning to own their own lands and to cultivate 
them for their own private use. But farm life had not 
yet taken on any of those features which became fa- 
miliar to the farm Hfe of New England at a later time. 

There were at first no hogs, no cattle, no horses, and 
no sheep. It is not possible now to determine at what 
period in the early colonial history domestic animals were 
first introduced. But cattle seem to have been imported 
before any horses wefe brought over. In a letter to the 
author of this book Mr. Longfellow wrote that the rea- 
son Priscilla rode on a white bull on her wedding day 
was that there was no horse in the colony at that 
time. 

As there were no roads and no bridges across streams 
the only way of going about was in small boats. For 
this reason all the early settlements, not only in Massa- 



78 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

chusetts but in Virginia also, were made as near to the 
water as possible. As time went on rude trails were 
broken through the forest, and trees, felled across streams, 
served the purpose of footbridges. When horses came 
into use they were employed as pack animals and thus 
little by little lands somewhat farther from the water came 
under cultivation. After a while wheeled vehicles slowly 
came into use. 

They were usually light " shays," drawn by one or 
two horses, and when these had to cross streams they 
were taken apart and packed in small boats, in which the 
passengers were ferried, leading their swimming horses 
along the side of the boat. But so far as the records 
show there were no wheeled vehicles of any kind in New 
England until near the end of the first century and no 
stately carriages of the kind then called coaches, until 
the eighteenth century was well advanced. When men 
travelled, at an earlier time, they walked, rode on horse- 
back, or went about in boats. 

The people who settled Massachusetts were mainly 
plain men and women belonging to what was known as 
the lower middle class in England. But in the Massa- 
chusetts Bay colony there were many men of the better 
sort — men of brains and character who were destined to 
found there some of the most distinguished families of 
America. There were among them none of those off- 
scourings of English society who constituted so large a 
proportion of the very earliest Virginia colonists. 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 79 



~y 










The aborigines. (From the original dravring made by John White, By 
permission of the British Museum.) 



80 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

These people upon establishing themselves in the New 
World set to work to meet conditions as they found them, 
and little by little to better themselves. The church was 
everywhere dominant and the Puritan church had a habit 
of enforcing its edicts in every house and upon every 
family. The young people were held rigidly in leash 
and were brought up " in the nurture and admonition of 
the Lord." All conduct on the part of the old and 
young, men and women alike, was subject to clerical 
criticism and, upon occasion, to churchly discipline. 

These people had come out to the New World in 
search of liberty of conscience. But they had not learned 
from their own sufferings under persecution to deal gen- 
erously with those who differed with them in religious 
opinion. They made severe laws for the repression 
of all who might undertake to teach other doctrines 
than those of the accepted faith. 

When at last a number of Friends, or Quakers, settled 
in Massachusetts and undertook to teach their doctrines 
they were punished by a whipping at the cart -tail and 
by banishment from the colony with a warning not to 
return. Some of them disregarded this warning and 
came back. Four of them, including one woman, were 
hanged for this offence. The majority of the people of 
Massachusetts were opposed to this hanging but the 
governor, Endicott, a reckless and intolerant bigot, or- 
dered it in defiance of public opinion. 

In 1 66 1 King Charles II, who was then reigning in 



FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 81 

England, forbade all further persecution of the sort, but 
his prohibition, while it prevented further hangings, did 
not secure to the poor Quakers a much larger liberty of 
conscience than before. Other persecutions for religion's 
sake occurred later. 
F 



CHAPTER VII 

MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE SETTLEMENTS, AND THE 
DUTCH COLONY OF NEW NETHERLAND 

THE reader will remember that about the time of. the 
planting of the Jamestown colony in Virginia an 

unsuccessful attempt was made by Captain George 
Popham to establish a settlement near the Kennebec 
River in what is now the state of Maine. That region 
was a tempting one because of its fishing, because of the 
abundance of game in its woodlands, and because of its 
timber. It was quite natural therefore that other efforts 
should be made to settle there. 

In 1623 a fisherman named David Thompson estab- 
lished himself on the Piscataqua River near its mouth. 
This was one of the first known settlements within what 
is now called the state of New Hampshire. Another 
settlement was made at Pemaquid, in Maine, in 1625. 

In the meanwhile Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John 
Mason received a grant of all the region between the 
Merrimac and Kennebec Rivers under the general name 
of Maine. A few years later, in 1629 Gorges and Mason 
received also a private grant of all the lands about Lake 

82 



MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE 83 

George and Lake Champlain. They called the region 
Laconia and sent out a trading company with settlers in 
1630 to occupy and possess the region. So indefinite 
was geographical knowledge at that time that during a 
three years' diligent search these people failed to find 
either Lake George or Lake Champlain. But in the 
meanwhile they established little stations on the Piscata- 
qua River which have grown to be the towns of Dover 
and Portsmouth in New Hampshire. 

Then Gorges and Mason divided their Maine grant, 
Gorges taking the portion east of the Piscataqua which 
was some years later organized as the province of Maine, 
while Mason took to himself the region now called New 
Hampshire. Near the end of the century the province 
of Maine was, after several annexations and severances, 
permanently annexed to Massachusetts and in the mean- 
while New Hampshire was several times joined to Mas- 
sachusetts but was finally separated from it in 1692, 
though one governor presided over both until 1741. 

During the years that had elapsed between the settle- 
ment at Jamestown and the planting of colonies in Mas- 
sachusetts, another very important settlement had been 
made on the American coast. It was not a settlement 
by Englishmen, but as it afterward became English it 
must be considered here as a part of the English settle- 
ment of America. 

John Smith, as we have seen, had made exploring 
voyages from Virginia to the north and had been persis- 



84 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

tent in his efforts to find that northwest passage through 
the continent of which all men at that time dreamed. 
He had heard from the Indians that there was such a 
passage into the Pacific Ocean somewhere north of Ches- 
apeake Bay. He had somewhere secured a map showing 
that passage a little to the north of Virginia. 

John Smith was a friend of Henry Hudson, the bold- 
est of English navigators, who was at that time in the 
service of the Dutch. Smith sent the map to Hudson 
with suggestions as to where the passageway would most 
probably be found. About that time Hudson was or- 
dered by his Dutch employers to make an effort to find 
a way to Asia by sailing around the north coast of 
Europe. He was specially instructed not to go to 
America, but finding his way blocked by ice on the north 
coast of Europe he studied John Smith's map and made 
up his mind to go to America in spite of orders, and 
search there for the desired passageway to the Indies. 
He struck the coast near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. 
Thence he went northward, examining every inlet and 
every river mouth. He went into the Delaware Bay and 
up the river to about the present site of Philadelphia. 
Finding no throughfare in that direction he returned to 
the sea and presently went into what is now New York 
Harbor. 

He entered that harbor in the year 1609. ^^ fol- 
lowed the river as far up as the present site of Albany, 
and thence he sent an open boat still farther up the 



MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE 



85 



stream, satisfying himself at last that no route to China 
existed in that direction. 

But if he had not found a water way through the con- 
tinent he had found a region rich in furs, whose native 
inhabitants were eager to trade with the Dutch for such 
wares as they had to offer. Immediately the Dutch 
traders in whose service he had made the voyage sent 
out agents whose business it was to buy furs of the In- 
dians for such trinkets as these 
savages desired. The traffic was 
enormously profitable from the 
beginning and the merchants en- 
gaged in it were eager to monopo- 
lize it. They secured a charter 
from the Dutch government 
which gave them a monopoly of 
it for three years and they sent 
out many traders to secure furs 
and pelts. In 1621 the Dutch 



government chartered what was 




ATLANTIC 
OCEAN 



SCALE OF MILES 



New Netherland. 



called the Dutch West India 

Company, giving it a permanent monopoly of this trade 

and a right to govern the regions thus possessed. 

The Dutch named this region New Netherland. 
They landed where the city of New York now stands and 
there they established their principal trading post. They 
pushed on up the river, establishing posts at different 
points and particularly on the spot where Albany now is. 



86 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

In 1 6 14, or perhaps a year or two earlier, the Dutch 
built a fort at what is now^ the Battery in New York, 
and called it ^\)rt Amsterdam. And as traders and 
settlers afterward came out they built a little town around 
that fort, thus making the beginning of New York — the 
largest city in America, and the second largest in the 
world. 

At first the Dutch sent out nobody but traders. It 
was not until- 1622 or 1623 — two or three years after 
the establishment of the Plymouth colony, that they be- 
gan sending out permanent colonists. They settled some 
of them at Fort Orange — now Albany — and others at 
the Wallabout, in what is now the borough of Brooklyn 
in New York City. 

It was not until 1626 that the Dutch sent out Peter 
Minuit as governor of New Netherland. As yet the 
Dutch traders had no title to Manhattan Island on which 
they had located their fort and on which New York City 



NlEUV,- AMSTERDAM 




The earliest picture of New Amsterdam, aljout 1650. (From an origi- 
nal copy of Van der Dunck's map.) 

now stands. Peter Minuit bought the island from the 
Indians for twenty-four dollars' worth of trinkets. 

The Dutch were enterprising traders and having es- 



MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE S7 

tablished themselves in America, with no other claim to 
possession there than that which rested upon the explo- 
rations of Henry Hudson, an Englishman temporarily in 
their employ, they set themselves to work to build up a 
permanent colony in the New World. 

As an inducement to this the Dutch West India Com- 
pany established the system of 
patroons. It decreed that spe- 
cial privileges should be given to 
every Dutchman who should 
plant settlements in America at 
his own expense. It was ordered 
that every member of the Dutch 
West India Company who should 
take fifty persons, above fifteen 
years of age, to America to set- Dutch women of old times. 
tie there should become the proprietor of a tract of land 
extending for sixteen miles along the river front, if lo- 
cated upon only one side of the river, or for eight miles 
on each side if the river divided the possession. It was 
further provided that over this domain the patroon should 
exercise the authority of a lord proprietor. He was re- 
quired to provide his colonists with all materials necessary 
for farming, exacting rent and certain feudal services of 
them in return. 

These patroons were common-place people in their 
home country — shopkeepers or merchants who had made 
money. In America, by reason of the possessions granted 




8S OUR FIRST CENTURY 

to them, they became great lords of the soil and their de- 
scendants even unto this day proudly trace their lineage 
from them as a heritage which they would not exchange 
for any wealth, although many of them are broken in 
fortune. 

The Dutchmen settled upon the Hudson claiming the 
territory east of them as far as the western bank of the 
Connecticut River and in 1633 they bought a part of 
that territory from the Indians. They so far occupied it 
as to set up a trading post where the city of Hartford now 
stands. This claim of theirs conflicted with the claim of 
the Massachusetts colonists to dominion from sea to sea, 
and out of it grew many perplexities as we shall see in 
the sequel. 



CHAPTER VIII 

MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS AND THE SETTLE- 
MENT OF CONNECTICUT AND RHODE ISLAND 

THE Connecticut valley was richer than the region 
east of it both in its fur-trading possibilities and in 
its agricultural fruitfulness. Little by httle the 
people of Plymouth became familiar with the fact that a 
far better region than their own lay to the west of them 
and presently they seriously contemplated the idea of re- 
moving themselves and all their possessions into the 
Connecticut River country. 

As a beginning of that enterprise in 1633 they sent 
out a vessel to the Connecticut River and built a house 
where the town of Windsor now stands. The Dutch 
threatened them but did not attack them, and in 1635 
the younger John Winthrop, a son of the governor of 
Massachusetts, went into that region with a commission 
to build a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River 
and to drive off all intruders. 

About this time there arose a considerable controversy 
among the Puritans in Massachusetts as to the constitu- 
tion of their government. Under that government in 
which, as we have seen, the church was dominant from 

89 



90 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



the first, nobody was allowed a voice or a vote except 
members of the Puritan church. Many of the colonists 
resented this and insisted that every man in the com- 
munity should have a vote whether he was a church 
member or not. 

There was an additional discontent in the Massachu- 
setts colonies because of the infertility of their lands, 
and especially because of the lack of pasturage for the 
cows, of which they now had considerable 
numbers. In 1635, therefore, and after- 
wards, a considerable number of these 
people, mostly from Dorchester and Wa- 
tertown, removed to what is now Connec- 
ticut and began little settlements at what 
w^e now know as Wcthersfield and Wind- 
sor. 

In the early summer of the next year, 
1636, there was a very considerable mi- 
gration from Newtown, now known as 
Cambridge, in Massachusetts, to the Connecticut River 
valley. There were new immigrants coming in all the 
time from England and to these the people in Newtown 
sold their houses and lands and themselves set out 
under the leadership of their pastor, Thomas Hooker, 
fo*!- the new and more fruitful country. The distance 
was small — not more than a hundred miles or so — but 
the wilderness lay in the way, through which the people 
had to cut a road for the passage of their cattle and the 




Puritan of the 
middle class. 



MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS 91 

transportation of their goods by such means as they had. 
We gain some idea of the difficulty of travel across 
country in those days from the fact that it took these 
people more than two weeks to make this short trip. 

These people settled where Hartford now is and soon 
afterwards the greater part of the people who had before 
occupied Dorchester removed to Windsor in Connecti- 
cut while those who had lived at Watertown removed to 
Wethersfield. 

All these changes of residence were prompted in part, 
of course, by considerations of material benefit ; but in 
still larger part they were prompted by the conscientious 
scruples of the people concerned in them as to the 
method of government adopted by the church in Massa- 
chusetts. 

Two or three years later — in 1639 — these towns 
united themselves into a single government under the 
first written constitution that was ever adopted in 
America. 

This constitution expressed and formulated into funda- 
mental law the ideas which had prompted these people 
to quit their comfortable homes and move westward into 
a wilderness in search of liberty. It guaranteed to 
every freeman a right to vote, and an equal voice in the 
government, without any reference whatever to his reli- 
gion or his church relation. So well was this constitution 
adapted to the conceptions of the popular mind that for 
no less than one hundred and eighty years afterwards it 



92 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 




endured as the fundamental law, first of the colony, and 
afterwards of the state into which the colony grew by 
virtue of the Revolution. 

But here it is necessary to make no mistake. Perfect 
religious liberty had not yet been born even in Connect- 
icut. While no man's right to a voice in the govern- 
ment of the community was denied by reason of his 
religious views or his lack of church 
membership, there was still intolerance 
particularly in the matter of a rigid Sab- 
batarianism. 

There had gradually come however a 
new and a nobler movement toward per- 
fect religious liberty. The Rev. Roger 
Williams was pastor of the church in 
Salem, Massachusetts. He was a man 
of broad and most liberal mind and of 
the utmost daring in the assertion of his 
thought. He preached — first of all men — that every 
man born into this world has a right to worship any God 
he pleases in any way that shall seem good to him. He 
contended that no man had, or could have, a right to 
limit this liberty of worship. He protested that no gov- 
ernment on earth could justly restrict men in this be- 
half. 

This doctrine, which Roger Williams afterwards called 
" soul liberty," was deemed by the authorities of Massa- 
chusetts exceedingly revolutionary and dangerous. In all 



Puritan of the 
middle class. 



MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS 93 

ages of the world authority has been quick to scent dan- 
ger in any preachment of hberty. 

Roger WilHams went even further than this and taught 
that this country belonged to the Indians and that no 
discovery by John Cabot or anybody else could give to 
any English king the right to give away lands here that 
did not belong to him. 

These were exceedingly revolutionary doctrines and in 
that time it was not the custom to let men alone who 
taught revolutionary doctrines. It was the custom in- 
stead to suppress them or to drive them out of the 
community whose institutions their teachings assailed. 
Accordingly in 1636 the authorities of Massachusetts 
ordered Roger Williams — greatly good and pious man 
that he was — to quit the colony and return to England 
at once. He quitted the colony but he did not return 
to England. Instead of that, at risk of his life, and with 
a certainty of encountering fearful hardship, he set off 
through the wintry wilderness to make a new home for 
himself on the waters of Narragansett Bay. After much 
suffering he reached that region and took refuge with 
Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags. Obeying his 
own conscience he asked no king, and no council, and no 
English authority anywhere, to give him the lands he 
needed for settlement. Instead of that he recognized 
the rightfulness of the Indians' title and he honestly se- 
cured what lands he needed from the Indian chief. 

There were others in the colonies of Massachusetts 



94 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

who sympathized with Roger Wilhams's ideas and these, 
little hy little, emigrated to his settlement of Providence. 
There for the first time in the entire history of this world 
of ours there was founded a community upon the prin- 
ciple of absolute, unquestioned, human and religious lib- 
erty. To Roger Williams above all men who have lived is 
due the credit of having first conceived and, as a states- 
man, acted upon the idea that every man born into the 
world has an absolute right to believe, to worship, and to 
do as he pleases, so long as in doing so he does not in- 
terfere with the equal right of any other human being 
to believe, to worship, and to do as he pleases. 

There was in Massachusetts at this time a very able 
and courageous woman named Anne Hutchinson. This 
woman had a gift of teaching and she taught. She had 
the instinct of both human and religious liberty and she 
preached that doctrine with all of fervor that was in her 
great nature. Her meetings were attended by pretty 
nearly all the influential women in Boston and upon their 
minds she made an impression so great that the narrow- 
minded ecclesiastics of that time became alarmed for 
their authority. She believed in liberty of conscience, in 
liberty of worship and in liberty of human thought. It 
was a time in which such teachings as these were regarded 
as dangerous to the foundations of society and so the good 
gentlemen who presided over churchly, and, in effect, over 
secular, affairs in Boston, excommunicated her fn^m the 
church and ordered her into banishment. Taking a party 



MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS 95 

of friends with her she removed to the island of Rhode Is- 
land, then known as Aquidneck. There certain of her 
friends had already founded a little town called Portsmouth 
and other exiles for conscience's sake joined her from 
time to time in that and neighboring settlements. After 
a time these settlements, made in behalf of liberty, and 
sympathizing with each other in all their ideas, were united 
into a single colony which afterwards became the state of 
Rhode Island. 

Territorially Rhode Island is the smallest state in the 
union. Historically it is scarcely too much to say that 
in one respect at least it is the greatest, inasmuch as it 
first gave birth to the thought of absolute political and 
religious liberty as a human right, and inasmuch as 
within its dominions, first of all places on earth, the idea 
of such Hberty was enacted into law. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CONFEDERATION OF THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 

THE fertility of the Connecticut River country con- 
tinued to tempt immigrants and in spite of the 
Dutch claims, a company of Puritans from Eng- 
land, after tarrying awhile in Boston, established a colony 
thirty miles west of the Connecticut River, at the point 




New Amsterdam in Stuyvesant's time. 

where the city of New Haven now stands, in 1638. 
These immigrants were even more intolerant in religious 
and political beliefs than were those of Plymouth or 
Massachusetts Bay. About a quarter of a century later 
this colony, and the settlements surrounding it, were 
96 



NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERATION 97 

united with the other colonies in that region and were 
called Connecticut. 

The Dutch in New Amsterdam still claimed the region 
west of the Connecticut River and by way of supporting 
their claim they bought lands there from the Pequot 
Indians. The Pequots seem to have had no good title 
to these lands. They had acquired them by force, driv- 
ing away another tribe which had previously owned the 
region. The English settlers, therefore, disputed the 
validity of the Dutch title thus obtained from the Pe- 
quots. They induced the Indians whom the Pequots had 
driven away to come back again and they supported them 
in their resumed possession of the lands by building, and 
arming, and manning a fort for their protection. There- 
upon the Pequots made war upon the English. The 
English accepted the challenge thus given and made 
war in return with the result that the Pequots were 
exterminated. 

This was the age of settlement. It must be borne in 
mind that as there were no railroads, no telegraphs, no 
mails, no country roads even, and no bridges over 
streams, the people who had settled in different parts of 
America were well-nigh as remote from each other in 
effect as if they had lived upon different continents. The 
settlements in Massachusetts were closely allied to each 
other and in close communication with their offshoot 
colonies in Connecticut. But the Dutch in New Am- 
sterdam were foreign and hostile to them. The Virgin- 
G 



98 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



SettI 




ements on the coast of Nonh America in the n.iddle of 
century. 



the 17th 



NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERATION 99 

ians were so far away and so inaccessible under the con- 
ditions of that time that very nearly nothing was known 
in the northern colonies of what might be happening 
down South and equally little was known down South 
of what was happening in New England. It is necessary 
to bear these facts in mind if we would understand the 
conditions of that time. 

And these facts were important in other ways. The 
peculiar isolation of the several colonies prompted the 
people of each of them to develop their own institutions 
each independently of all the others. 

There was only one thing which they possessed in 
common and that was a jealousy of their rights as Eng- 
lishmen. However conditions might differ in the sev- 
eral colonies and however men's views might vary, there 
was common to all of them a jealous insistence upon 
the fact that they were Englishmen entitled to govern 
themselves. Upon that as a foundation they built their 
political institutions. These varied in many details, but 
in substance they were the same at the North and at the 
South. In the same way while climatic and other condi- 
tions caused variance in ways of living, a common inherit- 
ance of English ideas and customs did much to create 
similarity. 

For the sake of mutual protection four of the New 
England Colonies — Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Con- 
necticut and New Haven formed a rather loosely con- 
structed confederation as early as 1643. This confed- 



100 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

eration had for its sole purpose the common defence. In 
other words the four colonies agreed to act together 
against any enemy that might attack them, Indians, Dutch 
or what not. Roger Williams's colony in Rhode Island 
and the people in the settlements on the Maine coast had 
a common interest in this defence and they wanted to join 
the little confederation. But in that day, differences of 
religious belief were not lightly regarded, and, because 
of their lack of orthodoxy from the New England point 
of view, Rhode Island and Maine were denied admission 
to the little confederation which was, in a way, the be- 
ginning of that great nation that we call the United 
States of America. 

In our day it seems. incredible that the small difference 
in religious opinion between Roger Williams, for exam- 
ple, and the Puritan preachers of Massachusetts should 
thus in effect interfere with an obviously desirable union 
of colonies for defence against a common and a savage 
enemy. But these are the facts of history. 



CHAPTER X 

THE CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND 

DURING the sixty or seventy years in which Vir- 
ginia and Massachusetts were securely establishing 
themselves as colonies and during which their set- 
tlements were spreading over the land, the work of Eng- 
lish colonization went on elsewhere in important ways. 

As we have seen, the Dutch settled in New Amster- 
dam and built up thriving trading posts and agricultural 
settlements there. During this same time — about 1638 
— a company of Swedes settled in Delaware near the 
site of the present city of Wilmington, They came over 
under a charter from Sweden. Sweden had no rights in 
America of any kind. She had not even a shadow of 
claim to any American lands by virtue of discovery or of 
exploration or of anything else. Nevertheless the gov- 
ernment of that country assumed authority to give a 
permit for this Swedish colony, which was called New 
Sweden. 

The permit was a fairly liberal one for that bigoted 
time. That is to say, it authorized Protestants of any 
nation to be shareholders in the company. This of course 
excluded Catholics and Jews, and everybody else who 

101 



102 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

did not belong to some Protestant church. In our day 
we should think this an exceedingly illiberal government, 
but in that time it was quite as Hberal as any other ex- 
isting on this continent, or anywhere else in the world, 
with the exceptions of Roger Williams's colony in Rhode 
Island and the Connecticut colony. 

Peter Minuit, who had been governor of the Dutch 
of New Netherland, went over to the Swedes and be- 
came the head of their settlement. For a time there 
was something like war between the Swedes in Dela- 
ware and the Dutch in New Netherland, a condition of 
affairs which was ended at last by an expedition sent out 
by Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor, to. take pos- 
session of the Delaware region and to make an end of 
the Swedish authority there. 

At the beginning the Dutch in New Netherland, who 
were traders above everything else, managed to get on 
very well with the Indians. They wanted to trade and 
so did the Indians. They therefore established amicable 
relations and built up a fairly rich commerce. But in 
1642, about thirty years after the first Dutch settlements 
were made, the Indians of Long Island and those of the 
Hudson River region became provoked by wrongs of 
many kinds and declared war upon the Dutch. 

The Dutch were not much given to war and they were 
peculiarly unskilled in carrying on warfare with the red 
men. They were distinctly a peaceful folk, entirely dif- 
ferent in temper from the settlers in New England and 



CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND 103 

in Virginia. Upon the outbreak of war therefore many 
of them fled from New Amsterdam — the present New 
York — to Fort Orange, now Albany, while still more of 
them took ship and went back to Holland. After the 
war had lasted for two years at cost of the lives of about 




Street in New Amsterdam. 

sixteen hundred Indians, the friendly Iroquois tribes in 
northern New York, concluded to take part in it on the 
side of the Dutch. The Iroquois had from the first driven 
a thriving trade with the Dutchmen and this war seriously 
interfered with it. Their strength was vastly greater than 



104 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

that of the tribes engaged in the war and so their inter- 
ference proved effective. It quickly brought about peace. 
During all this time the English had never relinquished 
their claim to the territory which lay between Virginia 
and Massachusetts. That claim rested upon the discov- 
ery of this coast by John Cabot almost an age before 
and upon later explorations. When the English asserted 
their claim to New Netherland the Dutch were practi- 
cally powerless to resist it. Not only was the Dutch 
nation weaker than Great Britain on the seas, and else- 
where, but the Dutch colonists were scattered over so 
vast an area of territory that they found it impossible 
to defend themselves. Another element of weakness 
on their part was that a great number of Englishmen 
had settled within the Dutch territory, and in a contest 
between the Dutch and English for possession, they 
were naturally disposed to side with the English. 

There was no formal war in existence between Hol- 
land and England. But in that ill- 
ordered time a fact of that sort made 
little difference. So in 1664 an Eng- 
lish fleet sailed into the harbor of New 
Amsterdam and without any excuse, 
except that of the high hand, demanded 
the surrender of the forts and the city. 
Teter Stuyvesant. At that time Peter Stuyvesant was 
governor, and it was his desire to resist the English de- 
mand. But the impossibility of doing so successfully 




CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND 105 

was so apparent that the people under his control suc- 
ceeded in curbing his ardor and in compeUing him to sur- 
render the city and the colony to the English. 

The name of the city was changed from New Amster- 
dam to New York and that of the territory tributary to 
it, which had hitherto been called New Netherland be- 
came also New York, a name given to it in honor of 
James, the Duke of York, to whom the whole province 
had been given by his brother, King Charles II of Eng- 
land, who, without any very well-defined right, assumed to 
own it. 

Nine years later the Dutch recaptured the colony but 
they were unable to hold it against the English power 
and so after a year they gave it up again. From that 
hour forward all of what we now know as New York 
State, together with all the settlements in the New Jer- 
sey province on the other side of the Hudson River, be- 
came English possessions. 



CHAPTER XI 



MARYLAND 



DURING all this while the impulse of English settle- 
ment in America was manifesting itself by the 
founding of colonies on many parts of the coast. 
During the early part of that century of settlement there 
was planted a new colony in what we now call Maryland, 
under peculiar auspices. George Calvert was a member 
of the original Virginia Company and 
was a man near and dear to King 
James I, who later made him one of 
the councilors for New England. A 
little later still King James raised him 
to the Irish peerage as Lord Balti- 
more. Baltimore had become a 
CathoHc in religion, and Catholics 
were at that time sorely persecuted in 
England. He planned, therefore, to plant a colony in 
America where men of that faith should be permitted to 
worship in their own way without state or other interfer- 
ence. The king granted to Baltimore the privilege of 
establishing such a colony and Lord Baltimore sent out 
for that purpose a considerable company of men of the 
106 




Lord Baltimore. 



MARYLAND 107 

Catholic faith and undertook to settle them in New- 
foundland. He named his colony Avalon — a pretty- 
name, but one which did not overcome the rigors of the 
climate of Newfoundland or render the sterile soil of that 
region more fruitful. 

Realizing the inhospitality of the climate in which he 
had settled his people, Lord Baltimore wisely sought a 
grant of land in some more habitable part of America. 
He fixed upon Virginia as a region suited to his purpose. 
He wrote to King Charles asking him for a grant of 
land there, and the king was disposed to make it. But 
the Virginians objected on account of Lord Baltimore's 
acceptance of the 
Catholic faith and also 
because they did not 
want any of their 
lands alienated. At 
that time the test be- Lord Baltimore penny. 

tween Catholics and Protestants in England was the ques- 
tion of who was head of the church. Since the time of 
Henry VHI the Protestants had contended that the king 
occupied that position in England while the Catholics had 
as stoutly held that the Pope filled it in all parts of the 
world. 

The Virginians demanded that before Baltimore should 
be permitted to settle his colonists within what was then 
a Virginian domain he should take an oath recognizing 
the king as the head of the church. As a devout Catho- 




108 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



lie, Baltimore could not do this and so he was forbidden 
to plant his colony in Virginia. 

Returning to England he secured from King Charles 
permission to settle in that part of Virginia which lay 
north of the Potomac River, and to establish there a 
separate colony called Maryland. Before this permission 

was issued to him, 
however, he died 
and a charter was 
given instead to 
his son, Cecil Cal- 
vert, the second 
Lord Baltimore. 
The permission 
carried with it 
practically all the 
rights of sover- 




Maryland by the original grant to Lord 
Baltimore. 



eignty — the right 
to coin money, to 
declare war, to make peace, to enact laws, and to do 
whatever else a sovereign may. No other grant of lands 
in America carried with it so much of sovereignty as this 
one did. 

Two years later, in 1634, Lord Baltimore's colonists 
landed near the mouth of the Potomac River. There 
was an Lidian village there with cornfields round about 
it. Lord Baltimore's brother, Leonard Calvert, who was 
in charge of the colonists, bought the village and the corn- 



MARYLAND 109 

fields and from the first lived on good terms with the 
Indians. The company consisted of about three hundred 
men, mostly laborers and servants, with only twenty 
'* gentlemen " added to their number. It was the inten- 
tion that the colony should be a Catholic one, and par- 
ticularly that it should be a refuge for Catholics perse- 
cuted in England and elsewhere for their religion. But, 
from the first, Lord Baltimore decreed that all forms of 
the Christian religion should be tolerated in the colony 
and that there should be no persecution of any Christian 
man because of his faith. 

Here again we have a comparatively liberal provision 
for liberty in religious belief, but again we find that 
toleration was confined rigidly to Christians. No pro- 
vision was made for the Jew or for the Unitarian, or for the 
unbeliever. The fact still remained that in Rhode Island 
alone, of all the American colonies, " soul liberty " was 
recognized and respected of the law, with the Northern 
Connecticut colony closely following. The New Haven 
colony was illiberal in an extreme degree. 

There were many persons in Virginia who resented and 
resisted the authority of Lord Baltimore in his Maryland 
colony. Chief among these was William Claibourne 
who had made a settlement within the domain granted 
to Lord Baltimore and who refused to submit himself 
to the authority of the new colony or its proprietor. 
Claibourne was a stubborn and cantankerous person 
and he made much trouble for the colony, but after a 



no OUR FIRST CENTURY 

while he was driven away and the colony rested in 
peace. 

At this time there were a great many Puritans in Vir- 
ginia, where, under the law, the religion of the Church of 
England was established. After the manner of that time 
these Puritans were socially ostracized and even legally 
persecuted for their beliefs, and many of them removed 
from Virginia to Maryland in order to enjoy the tolerance 
granted by the Catholic colony the like of which they 
had not found in Virginia. 

There were so many of these Puritans that at last they 
outnumbered the Catholics in the Maryland colony and 
siezed upon the reins of government. Their first act was 
to abrogate the rule of tolerance established by Lord 
Baltimore and to pass a law in antagonism to the Catholic 
belief. It is hard for us in our time to understand an 
ingratitude of this character. But in those days the 
spirit of intolerance was dominant in a degree which we 
can scarcely imagine. Men sincerely thought their in- 
tolerance an act of service to God. 

Three years later Lord Baltimore again secured con- 
trol in Maryland and held it until the reign of William 
and Mary in England, when Maryland became Protestant 
again and the English church was established, though 
with a certain measure of toleration for the Catholics who 
at that time numbered about one-twelfth of the popula- 
tion. 



CHAPTER XII 



KING PHILIP S WAR 



MASSASOIT resolutely maintained peace with the 
Plymouth colonists so long as he lived. When 
he died his son, Philip — known in history as 
King Philip — succeeded him in authority over those In- 
dians with whom the Plymouth colonist came most di- 
rectly into contact. 

Philip cherished a double grievance against the whites. 
In the first place, as their numbers multiplied and their 
settlements expanded, they more and more encroached 
upon what had been the hunting grounds of his tribe, and 
that off ence was a greater one than it is easy for civilized 
people to understand. To the civilized man, land means 
merely an opportunity of cultivation. An acre or a few 
acres under tillage will produce food enough for a family. 
But to the savage who does not cultivate in any orderly 
way, but who depends for his living upon the spontaneous 
products of the soil, and still more upon the free spoil of 
the woods, multitudinous acres are necessary for the 
support of a very small population. The constantly in- 
creasing occupation by the English of what had previously 

111 



112 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

been hunting grounds of the Indians therefore was a 
menace to the prosperity of King PhiHp and his people. 

Another ground of offence against the EngUshmen 
was that they had converted many of the Indians to 
Christianity. These << praying Indians," as they were 
called, separated themselves from their fellows and lived 
under tutelage of the pious English colonists. To this 
extent King Philip lost control of his subjects and he 
very naturally resented the fact. In 1675 his resentment 
led to a war with the whites. The Indians seem in this 
case to have been the aggressors. They took several 
villages of the Plymouth colony, destroyed them by fire, 
and killed or captured many of their inhabitants. All 
this was the work of the Wampanoags who had hitherto 
been friendly, but the Narragansetts who had also pro- 
fessed the most devoted friendship for the whites, secretly 
aided their Indian allies and in war they were promptly 
recognized as enemies. The Narragansetts were fortified 
on a piece of high land in the midst of a swamp — now 
called Mt. Hope. There the whites attacked them 
in December, 1675, burned their village and destroyed 
many lives. The fight was a severe one in which the 
whites lost no less than two hundred men. Worse still, 
so far as they were concerned, was the result of their 
victory. It converted all of the savages into open ene- 
mies and it scattered them, like firebrands, all over the 
region roundabout. Wherever they found white people 
they killed them. Wherever there were towns they 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 113 

burned them. Wherever there were women and children 
they slaughtered them. The whites were slain by scores 
and hundreds and it was not until a year later that they 
learned how to fight the wily Indians. 

These white men had come out from Europe with 
European ideas of warfare. At the first they clad them- 
selves in armor so heavy as to render their movements 
slow and clumsy. After a while they learned that if 
they were to fight Indians successfully they must strip 
off those encumbrances and render themselves as lithe 
and as quick in movement as the Indians themselves 




King Philip's samp bowl, and lock of gun with which he was killed. 
(From the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society.) 

were. They learned also the Indian tricks of ambush. 
They learned how to walk in Indian file each man tread- 
ing in the tracks of the man in front of him so that no 
ingenuity of observation could make so much as a guess 
as to the number of men who had passed over a particu- 
lar path. They learned how a man set to observe the 
movements of an enemy might so clothe himself in 

H 



114 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

leaves and twigs as to stand unobserved among the 
bushes and safely watch and count an enemy's forces 
passing by. 

Having learned the art of fighting Indians the white 
men finally drove them into a swamp where the red men 
supposed that they had a secure hiding place. But one 
of the Indians betrayed the secret of their refuge and 
one Captain Benjamin Church promptly surrounded and 
massacred the whole company killing Philip himself in 
the action. 

Thus in 1676 ended a war which had cost the Massa- 
chusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies the destruction of 
more than half their towns and the slaughter of more 
than one-tenth of all their men of military age. On the 
other hand, it had resulted in the death of more than two 
thousand Indians and the capture of many more who 
were sold into West Indian slavery. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 

FROM 1634, when Lord Baltimore's Maryland colony- 
was established, until 1663 — a period of about thirty 
years — there was almost nothing done in the way 
of the further colonizing of America except in strength- 
ening the colonies already existing. This was because 
of the troublous times in England. There was a great 
contest in that country between the king, representing 
his claim to absolute authority, and the parliament, rep- 
resenting the claim of the people to a share in the gov- 
ernment. It was a time of acrimonious disputes between 
religious denominations. There were arrests and execu- 
tions, and at last, in 1642 an open civil war began. Seven 
years later that war ended in the dethronement and be- 
heading of the king, Charles I. 

Then Oliver Cromwell became Protector of the Com- 
monwealth, for England no longer had a king, and Crom- 
well by virtue of his victories had become supreme. 

In 1660 the monarchy was restored and Charles II 
became king. During the Commonwealth period the 
immigration of the cavaliers who were adherents of the 
royal cause had swelled the population of Virgina from 

115 



116 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



about seven thousand five hundred souls to more than 
thirty thousand. But apart, from that, there had been 
almost no emigration to the colonies. Englishmen had 
quite enough to occupy them at home. 

Soon after the reign of Charles II began, a new effort 
was made to extend the British occupation of America. 

By the king's decree the southern part of what was 



V I R G \n~-^t\k\r-\Bav^ 




QVLF OF^ 

a>2 

hexico 



Carolina by the grant of 1663. 

then called Virginia was cut off from the colony in the 
year 1663, and was granted to eight courtiers and favorites 
of the king. In honor of their sovereign and benefactor 
they adopted for the region given to them the name Car- 
olina, which the French had already bestowed upon it. 

The territory thus granted included practically the 
whole of the present states of North and South Carolina 



THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 117 

with indefinite extensions westward. It was a vast region 
extending from the sea on the east, across the mountains, 
and far into the west. Its soil was rich and its cHmate 
favorable in different parts to every form of agricul- 
ture. 

Except for one little settlement in the extreme north- 
eastern corner of that territory, on Albemarle Sound, 
this region was wholly uninhabited except by the Indians. 
This one little colony was an offshoot from Virginia. 
It consisted of a company of men and women led thither 
by a preacher named Roger Green. Roger Green 
seems to have been a man of vigor and a great deal 
of sense, and his settlement flourished from the begin- 
ning. It was a very small colony but it managed to 
open fields and to support itself from the first. It was 
promiptly adopted, therefore, by the speculative Lords 
Proprietors in England, as a beginning of the settlement 
of their domain and in honor of the Duke of Albemarle, 
who w^as one of them, they named it the Albemarle col- 
ony. 

Among all the blunders made in P^ngland in planning 
the settlement of America there was none so ridiculous 
perhaps as that which was made in the case of this Caro- 
lina country. With the exception of the little colony on 
Albemarle Sound and of another which was presently 
planted (1663) on Cape Fear River, near the spot where 
Wilmington now stands, and which was soon broken up 
and scattered, the whole region was a wilderness of forest 



118 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

and swamp, infested by Indians more or less disposed to 
be hostile. The problem of the Lords Proprietors was 
to get industrious men to settle there, cut down the for- 
ests, open fields, make homes, defend themselves against 
the Indians and the Spanish and find out how to turn the 
productiveness of that most favorable soil and climate to 
profitable account. But in those days it was the custom 
of men everywhere, as has been pointed out earlier in this 
book, to do their thinking without much reference to 
facts or conditions. So the Lords Proprietors in England 
put their heads together, employed the philosopher, John 
Locke, to aid them, and decided to build up in the Caro- 
linas a great aristocratic government with an arbitrary 
class system. 




Carolina elephant piece. 

Under this constitution there were to be landgraves 
and caciques, and every other sort of big and little nabobs 
to rule the people and to hold complex tenures of the 
lands, exploiting them all for the enrichment of the Lords 
Proprietors in England. For in that day whoever in 
England secured a grant of land in America and under- 



THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 119 

took to colonize it did so chiefly for his own enrichment 
and with little or no concern for the welfare of the people 
who were to do the colonizing, encounter the risks, brave 
the dangers, and endure the hardships of settlement in 
America. 

It is possible that such a constitution as that which 
John Locke and the Lords Proprietors devised and 
sought to enforce upon the log cabin settlements in the 
Carolinas, might have worked fairly well in some old 
country where conditions of society were already settled 
and where class distinctions were fixed. But in the 
swamps and forests of the Carolinas, where every man 
stood upon his own merits, its absurd unfitness for exist- 
ing conditions was manifest from the first to those who 
lived in the midst of those conditions. In the Carolinas 
this scheme of government failed from the beginning. 
The sturdy fellows who came out and settled the wilder- 
ness utterly disregarded it and after a time it became 
apparent even to the Lords Proprietors in England that 
it would not work. 

The people in America were in revolt against it early 
in the history of the colony. They saw in it first of all a 
scheme for giving to the Lords Proprietors practically all 
the profits of the industry of those who had been sent 
out to settle the Carolinas ; and secondly they saw in it 
a scheme to make of the colonists a species of serfs in a 
land where all the conditions, and indeed the very atmos- 
phere, prompted men to thoughts of human equaHty of 



120 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



right. In face of such revolt the proprietors of the col- 
ony presently abandoned their scheme of government. 

Men were found, however, to come out as colonists 
with very little thought perhaps on their part of submit- 
ting themselves to the elaborate aristocratic system which 
the Lords Proprietors had imposed upon the colony, and 
which they, the settlers, when once established here felt 

themselves entirely free 
to cast aside, as so much 
legal rubbish. 

In 1670 the first suc- 
cessful colony made under 
the auspices of the Lords 
Proprietors was sent out 
under one William Sayle. 
It settled at first at Port 
Royal in South Carolina. 
So far as agricultural pos- 
sibilities were concerned 
there could hardly have 
been a better locality than this for the estabUshment of 
a colony that intended to cultivate the soil. But the 
harbor of Port Royal is a wide one at its mouth, and one 
easily penetrable by an enemy. In those days the cannon 
in use were small and very short in their ranges. They 
could not defend such a harbor as that of Port Royal if 
it should be attacked by Spanish ships from Florida, as 
it was liable to be at any time. It was soon decided 




Seal of the Lords Proprietors of 
Carolina — reverse. (From an im- 
pression in the English State Paper 
Office.) 



THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 121 

therefore, to remove the colony to a more defensible lo- 
cality. 

That locality was found near the peninsula upon 
which the city of Charleston now stands. There the 
harbor mouth was comparatively narrow and land de- 
fence was easy. The harbor at that point is formed 
by the junction of two rivers — the Ashley and the 
Cooper — one of which washes the southern and the other 
the northern side of the peninsula upon which the city 
of Charleston now stands. But at first the colonists 
seem not to have realized the advantage of settling on 
the present site of Charleston. Instead of that they 
located themselves on the southern bank of the Ashley 
River near where Wappoo Cut separates James Island 
from the mainland. 

That locality proved to be exceedingly unwholesome, 
besides being in other ways far less desirable than the 
point of land between the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers, 
and so, ten years after the settlement there, the whole 
colony was removed across the river and a town was 
built, called Charles Town. This was destined to be- 
come the principal city in the Carolinas and it retained 
its name of Charles Town until the end of the Ameri- 
can Revolution when the state of South Carolina, moved 
by a patriotic impulse, changed it to Charleston. 

Up to this time all of the settlements in America, or 
nearly all of them, had been built up slowly by emigra- 
tion from Europe ; there were now and then small mi- 



122 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



grations from one colony to another, as in 1665 when 
some of the New Haven colonists went to New Jersey. 
But about 1674 a considerable secondary migration 
began — that is to say — the migration of men and women 
from some of the colonies to others. 

The Dutch colony of New Netherland, as we know, 
had been seized by the British ten years before. In 1673 
the Dutch had retaken it temporarily, but in the next 
year it had become English again. The unsettled con- 
dition of affairs in what was now the colony of. New 
York, and other considerations, led at that time to a 
very considerable migration from that region into the 
enticing Carolina country. This migration helped in the 
upbuilding of the Carolinas. 

But still more important was another 
source of human supply. This was the 
incoming of French Huguenots, driven 
out of their own country by persecution, 
who settled in considerable numbers 
along the Carolina coasts, especially oc- 
cupying those " sea islands " which have 
since become so famous for their enor- 
mous productiveness of cotton, rice and 
other crops. 

These French Huguenots constituted 
a most desirable population. There were many culti- 
vated people among them and they brought with them 
the instincts and the aspirations of culture. Their de- 




Huguenot mer- 
chant. 



THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 123 

scendants became the foremost people in all that region 
— the people who best represented education, enlighten- 
ment of life and high character. Their French family 
names — greatly perverted now in many cases, so far as 
pronunciation is concerned — are still the names best 
known in the low countries of that part of the state. 
They became the founders of families which have ever 
since exercised influence for good in the land — families 
commonly spoken of as aristocratic because of their 
wealth and their culture. Their purity of character, and 
their interest in the public welfare have made them lead- 
ers among men in that region. Still it has never been 
their habit or their purpose to assume to themselves an 
attitude of superiority to their neighbors. 

During the earlier years of the Carolina settlements 
the people who were making homes there labored under 
the same difficulty that had confronted the Virginians 
and the New England people, in not knowing what 
crops could be most successfully cultivated in a climate 
and a soil with which they were unfamiliar. Cotton, 
it must be remembered, was not at that time, or for 
many years afterwards, a profitable crop to cultivate. 
Not until near the end of the eighteenth century was 
the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney, and until that 
time the cultivation of cotton was unprofitable by reason 
of the enormous amount of labor necessary to separate 
the seed from the fiber of the plant. 

The soil of the Carolinas was rich enough to produce 



124 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

anything in the way of plant hfe that might be seeded 
there. But what to grow and how to grow it the people 
at first did not know. The colonists grew corn of course, 
especially in the northern part of Carolina, and they grew 
wheat with only moderate success, the climate being 
rather too warm for the best results to be achieved in 
the cultiv-u-cion of that grain. 

Among the people who tilled plantations, especially in 
the southern parts of the Carolinas, there was, therefore, 
a long period of experimentation before at last they 
learned how best to make their fields fruitful. It was 
not until near the end of the seventeenth century — about 
1696 — that a man named Thomas Smith found out how 
richly the South Carolina marshes would yield, if planted 
and intelligently cultivated in rice. 

It was not until nearly fifty years later that Eliza 
Lucas, a girl of sixteen who managed three plantations, 
while studying music, entertaining her friends, and in 
other ways playing the part of a great lady, introduced, 
by her own exertions, the successful cultivation of in- 
digo. But the story of all this belongs to a later time. 

In the meanwhile the Carolinians went on growing 
grains with which they were acquainted ; multiplying their 
herds of hogs and cattle and prospering as best they 
could in a country whose climate and soil were strange 
to them. 

During the first thirty years of Carolina colonization 
there was only one Indian war of consequence and that 



THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 125 

occurred about the time when the settlement was made. 
This was an attack by the Westoes which very nearly 
destroyed the settlement. The Westoes were beaten 
off at last and it was not until the early years of the next 
century that the Carolinas were again menaced with 
destruction by the Indians. 

The Carolinas had every physical advanta^ tending 
to make of them successful and prosperous colonies. 
Along the coasts, especially in the southern part of Caro- 
lina, the soil was incredibly rich and fruitful. It lay very 
low, so low indeed that much of it was marsh. Just west 
of this great strip of fertile marsh lay a little higher 
ground from which the drainage flows into these swamps. 
In later days, when the cultivation of rice and Sea Island 
cotton was developed, the lowlands became perhaps the 
most fruitful that existed anywhere in the world, if we meas- 
ure fruitfulness by the pecuniary returns of agriculture. 

The islands that bordered that coast lay about on a 
level with the mainland from which they were separated 
by sloughs, inlets and streams. Their adaptation to the 
growth of that finest of all vegetable fibers, the Sea Is- 
land cotton, was perfect, and it was destined to make 
the people of that region rich beyond their utmost de- 
sires. The lower mainlands were almost perfectly level 
and were easily susceptible, when rice culture came, of 
such arrangement, by dams, and ditches, and flood gates, 
that they could be alternately flooded and drained at will 
in accordance with the needs of rice cultivation. 



126 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



The result has been that between Sea Island cotton 
cultivation and the growing of rice, this coast region af- 
terward became the very richest of all agricultural coun- 
tries. 

But this form of cultivation required large capital on 
the part of those who followed it and so there was slowly 
built up there a company of great planters with magnif- 
icent plantation houses — some of the planters owning 
five or six such country seats — and all of them men 
of great and rapidly increasing wealth. All this came 
much later, however, and there was only a beginning 
of the rice culture near the end of the century of which 
this volume treats. 

Further north, in that part of the re- 
gion which we now know as North Caro- 
lina, another great source of wealth ex- 
isted in the coast country, but it was not 
greatly developed until after the year 
1700 or a little later, when bounties 
brought the manufacture of naval stores 
into abundant prosperity. There were 
in that region tracts of sandy soil studded 
so thickly with enormous forest pines 
that the sunlight itself had difficulty in 
sifting through their foliage and shining upon the ground. 
Here early beginnings were made in the industry of 
manufacturing turpentine, rosin tar, pitch and lampblack. 
It was the practice to strip away the bark of the great 




Huguenot mer- 
chant's wife. 



THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 127 

trees in sections, leaving other sections, between these, 
untouched, so that the sap might flow and the tree con- 
tinue to live. From those parts of the tree which were 
thus denuded of their bark there exuded a vastly abun- 
dant supply of resin. This resin was put through a proc- 
ess of distillation which produced turpentine as a direct 
product and rosin as an indirect one. So long as the 
tree continued to live it was cherished and its annual 
product of resin was manufactured into the articles al- 
ready mentioned. When at last the tree died it was cut 
down and its fat resinous wood was split into suitable 
sizes and roasted in a tar kiln. From it came a rich 
supply of tar while the smoke from its roasting was 
caught above upon screens of wire, as lampblack. As 
there were no ashes from this combustion and as only 
the bark of the trees was used for fuel under the tar 
kilns there was next to no waste whatever. 

In our day of course more economical methods pre- 
vail, and with an advanced chemistry many precious prod- 
ucts are extracted from the tar which were unknown 
in the time of the colonists. 

In both the southern and the northern parts of the 
Carolinas the land rose as it stretched westward, until 
at last the Appalachian Mountains were reached and the 
valley that lay beyond them. In these parts corn and 
wheat and the ordinary products of agriculture were ca- 
pable of abundant production but the region was not oc- 
cupied to any considerable extent until the next century. 



128 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

Up to the end of the seventeenth century the two Caro- 
Hnas, though they were in fact separately governed, were 
regarded and treated by the Lords Proprietors in London 
as a single colony. They were governed in the interest 
of the proprietors and they were governed exceedingly 
badly, so far as the interests of the colony, and the col- 
onists were concerned. Up to the end of that period 
with which the present volume deals they remained a 
proprietary colony — that is to say — a colony owned by a 
company of men in London and governed in the interest 
and for the enrichment of that company. 



CHAPTER XIV 

NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 

THE Dutch in New Amsterdam had scarcely at all 
occupied the region west and southwest of the 

mouth of the Hudson River, now known as New 
Jersey. The English, who succeeded the Dutch in con- 
trol of New York, in 1664 soon saw the advantage of 
colonizing that region, where only a very few Swedes and 
Dutch were at that time settled. 

Accordingly the new proprietor gave the eastern part 
of the practically unoccupied country — that is to say the 
part of it which lay east of the Delaware River — to Lord 
Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, who named it New 
Jersey. 

Here again was dominant the English notion of that 
time that the only use to make of American lands was 
to people them with colonists whose labor should enrich 
proprietors in England. In pursuit of that policy Philip 
Carteret was appointed Governor of New Jersey and in 
1665 he landed at Elizabethtown with thirty colonists. 
In order to attract settlers he promised liberty of con- 
science to all and guaranteed a generously free govern- 
ment. In response to these promises a considerable 

I 129 



130 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

number of people settled in New Jersey, some of them 
coming directly from England and some from the New 
Haven colony where religious intolerance had bred a good 
deal of discontent. 

Ten or a dozen years later a half interest in the New 
Jersey colony was purchased by William Penn and some 
other Quakers in England and the province was divided. 
Under the division, the western part of it, then known 
as West Jersey, passed under control of Penn and his 
friends while the eastern part remained the property of 
Sir George Carteret. 

Even in our day we often hear New Jersey spoken of 
in the plural as " The Jerseys." This is a historical 
memory of the fact that at one time there were two 
provinces there. East and West Jersey. 

A few years later, namely, in 1682, William Penn, 
who already controlled West Jersey, secured control also 
of East Jersey, with a number of associates at his back. 

The management of the eastern colony was exces- 
sively bad from the first and in 1702 it became neces- 
sary to make New Jersey a royal province, taking it 
away from the proprietors and placing it under the direct 
government of the king. 

West of the Delaware River lay a vast region, now 
known as Pennsylvania. It was unoccupied even well 
into the reign of Charles II, and it had up to that time 
not been granted to proprietors of any kind. It was a 
rich region, as we now know, but for some reason it 



NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 131 

seems not to have appealed to the cupidity of royal 
favorites up to that time — perhaps because they were 
weak in their geography. 

The man who was destined to possess it lived still in 
England. He was William Penn, the same who had 
for a time owned the greater part of New Jersey. He 
had never been in America and he knew comparatively 
little about this country. But he was a man of large 
mind and great enterprise. He was the son of Admiral 
William Penn, who had greatly distinguished himself as 
an officer of the British Navy. 

William Penn the younger, during his course at one 
of the great English universities had fallen under the 
influence of George Fox, the founder of the sect known 
as Friends, or Quakers, and had become a devotee of 
their religion. His father, who had been a fighter all 
his life, was profoundly disgusted with his son's adoption 
of a religion which condemned all fighting, and conse- 
quently for a time the father and son were at outs with 
each other. After a time however they became recon- 
ciled, and the elder Penn at his death left to his son his 
great properties, including a vast debt owed to him by 
the King of England. 

In 1 68 1, Charles II agreed to pay this debt to William 
Penn the younger, by giving him a grant of forty thou- 
sand square miles of land in America, lying west of 
the Delaware River — substantially the region now known 
as the state of Pennsylvania. That name the king gave 



132 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



to it in honor, not of the Wilham Penn to whom he 
granted it, but of the elder, the Admiral William Penn, 
who had served England so well in her wars. William 
Penn immediately sent out some emigrants to take pos- 
session of the country and they landed where Philadel- 
phia now stands. 




William Penn. 



The region was a fertile and fruitful one, and tempt- 
ing to the mind even at that time, though its vast 
mineral wealth in coal and iron was not then dreamed 
of. It had no sea coast, however, and no secure outlet 
to the sea. To provide against this difficulty Penn 
bought from the Duke of York the little strip of co^mtry 



NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 133 

along the Delaware River, which is now a part of the 
state of Delaware, thus securing an ocean outlet for his 
colony. 

During the next year after Penn's first colonists had 
settled themselves at Philadelphia he, himself, came out 
to take possession there and to become, as he was called 
in that time, the Quaker King. 

The people of his faith were subjected at that time to 
much persecution in England, and it was his purpose to 
provide for them in America a refuge where they might 
preach and practice their religion without let or hin- 
drance. 

When Penn landed in the colony, he had a hundred 
of his adherents with him and others rapidly followed, 
planted themselves on various rivers and bays, and 
speedily built up, by their thrift and energy, a number of 
prosperous settlements. 

The formal transfer of the control of Delaware from 
the agents of the Duke of York, to William Penn, its 
new proprietor, involved much of picturesque symbolism. 
When William Penn landed on the shore, the agents of 
the Duke of York formally delivered to him the key to 
the fort. With it he unlocked the door, entered, and 
locked the door again on the inside. That was to signify 
that he was master there. Presently he unlocked the 
door and came out again. That was to signify that the 
whole domain, outside the fort, as well as within it, be- 
longed to him. Next there was brought to him a piece 



134 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



of sod with a twig implanted in it, and a dish filled with 
water from the river. These things were given to him 
and accepted by him to indicate that all the land, with 
its forests, its fields and its streams, were thus transferred 
to his control. 

It was Penn's plan to found his colony upon a basis of 
complete religious hberty, as he understood it. He called 

together a legislature repre- 
sentative of the people, and 
organized a government. 
This body decreed that 
every man in the colony — 
whether English or foreign 
fborn — should be entitled to 
vote in all its elections so 
long as he paid his taxes. 
It further decreed that all 
Christians of whatsoever 
denomination should be en- 
titled to hold public office 
upon election by their fel- 
low citizens. In that time 
such a government as this was thought to be extremely 
liberal, for in that day it had scarcely occurred to any 
man outside of Rhode Island that Jews and unbelievers, 
and other persons who were not classed as Christians, 
were entitled, or could be entitled, to equal rights with 
their fellow men even in a liberal Quaker commonwealth. 




William Penn's chair, in Inde- 
pendence Hall, Philadelphia. 



NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 135 

The fact still remained that the little colony of Rhode 
Island was the only region on this great continent where 
any such things as real and unrestrained religious liberty, 
and the absolute equality of men before the law, as we 
now understand these things, were fully recognized, 
though Connecticut was a close rival of Rhode Island in 
liberality. Nevertheless the liberality of Penn's govern- 
ment was so much greater than that which existed in 
most of the colonies that immigrants rapidly flowed into 
Pennsylvania not only from Europe but from the other 
colonies and speedily built it up into one of the most 
populous of the provinces. 

It was William Penn's policy from the first to make 
and keep peace with the Indians round about him. This 
policy was in strict accordance with his religion, which 
taught that all war is wrong and wicked. But it was 
also good poHcy from the point of view of business in- 
terests. It is always and everywhere much cheaper to 
deal fairly with men and to keep the peace with them 
than it is to fight them. 

Accordingly one of William Penn's earliest proceedings, 
after his settlement in the colony, was to invite the chiefs 
of the Indians, who lived near at hand, to meet him for 
the purpose of making a treaty. He frankly recognized 
their right to the country which had been granted to 
him by an English king who did not own it, and he pro- 
posed to purchase from them, as other colonists had now 
and then done, all the lands that this English king had 



136 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

given to him. The purchase of course involved the 
expenditure of very little money, as the Indians held 
their lands cheap, and it secured peace as well as posses- 
sion. 

•Penn explained to the Indians the principles of his re- 
ligion and asked them to live with him and his colonists 




Wampum belt, presented by Indians to William Penn. 
(By permission of the Library Company of Philadelphia.) 

upon those terms of friendship which were the bases of 
that religion. The Indians, who were friendlier than those 
in most other colonies had been, were glad enough to do 
this. They took the price that he offered them for their 
lands, and they promised " to live in love with William 
Penn and his children," "while grass grows and water 
runs." That \vas the Indian equivalent of the abstract 
word " forever." It is a fact illustrating the good faith 
of the Indians, that so long as William Penn lived, no 
Indian ever killed a Quaker. 

Thus between 1607, when the first permanent English 
colony was planted at Jamestown in Virginia, and the mid- 
dle of that century, English adventurers of various sorts 



NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 137 

had possessed themselves of the country from Maine on 
the north to the Savannah River on the south. In every 
part of that region thriving settlements had been built 
up, farms had been established, plantations had been 
opened, the forests had been invaded and the plough and 
the hoe had begun to do their work of cultivation and 
civilization. 

In the absence of railways, and steamboats, and steam- 




Penn's house in Philadelphia. 

ships, and telegraphs, and even of mails, or country roads 
and bridges across streams, there was slow and very in- 
frequent communication between one and another of the 
colonies. But all of them were occupied by English- 
men, inspired by the English love of liberty and the En- 
glish conception of the natural rights of man. In all of 



138 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

them, except Pennsylvania, the colonists were guaran- 
teed, by their charters or grants of other kinds, those 
fundamental rights which from the time of Magna 
Charta had belonged to Englishmen. In all of them — 
not even excepting Pennsylvania — conditions had tended 
to develop a certain jealousy of such rights, a jealousy 
which was destined, more than a hundred years later, to 
unite them in a common struggle for independence of 
British rule. 

In the meanwhile they had encountered dangers and 
difficulties which had served to strengthen the manhood 
of their people, and to develop among them a spirit of 
self-reliance which was destined to play a great part in 
world history at a later time. Of these difficulties and 
contests of the early days of the colonies an account will 
be given in another chapter. 



CHAPTER XV 

EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 

SO far as the relations of the colonies with British au- 
thority were concerned Virginia and Massachusetts 
were from first to last the representatives and leaders 
of all the rest. They were the strongest of the colonies 
and by all odds the most independent in spirit. Their age 
as colonies was in their favor, and during long periods, es- 
pecially during the time of the Civil War and the Com- 
monwealth in England, they had been largely left to their 
own devices so far as their government was concerned. 
These two colonies had, therefore, acquired the habit of 
independence and self-government, and that habit clung 
to them closely. This is a fact of great importance to a 
just understanding of American history. 

In New England for example, during the twenty years 
or so of the Civil War and the Puritan ascendency in Eng- 
land — that is to say, from about 1640 to about 1660, when 
Charles II came back to the throne — the colonies were 
left free to carry on their own affairs in their own way, 
without much of interference from England. Those 
colonies had a sturdy, independent and resolute people 

139 



140 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

for their population and such a people were not inclined 
to surrender liberty and self-government, after having 
enjoyed and exercised them for so long a period. 

In Massachusetts particularly the spirit of independ- 
ence had grown so great that the people of that colony 
were not disposed in any way to recognize an authority 
without themselves. They were a brave, hard-headed, 
resolute sort of men, those men of Massachusetts, and 
they very reasonably thought that they knew better than 
anybody in England could know what was good for their 
common weal. They were men also accustomed, through 
generations, to look out for themselves, and there was no 
spirit of tameness in them when they were called upon 
to submit to dictation from any source. The Virginians 
of that better class which had become dominant there, 
were of similar spirit as the result of a like experience. 

When Charles II came to the throne in England he 
resented the attitude of the people of the colonies and 
especially that of the people of Massachusetts. In 
order to curb it and to assert his absolute authority, he 
sent commissioners to that colony with authority to in- 
quire into its conditions and to govern it. It was easy 
to send them, but it was by no means so easy to support 
them in their authority against the, resolute protests of 
an energetic and spiritually independent people. Those 
people resisted. The king decided, therefore, to annul 
the charter they held and to leave the people of the 
colony with no rights whatever, except such as he might 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 141 

grant them of his own good pleasure. That charter, as 
has been related before, was granted in 1629 and was 
intended to be a grant of privilege to a company in 
England. But, as we have also seen, the Puritans had 
transferred it and the seat of its government to Massa- 
chusetts, making the people of that colony members of 
the company, and thus securing to them all the authority 
that the charter was intended to grant to a company in 
England. 

Subservient courts in England yielded to King 
Charles's will and granted his request for an annulment 
of the charter. The people of Massachusetts resolutely 
declined to accept the judgment of those courts or in 
any other way to surrender their rights under the char- 




New England elephant piece. 

ter. Their charter was annulled, but they continued to 
regard themselves possessed of all the liberties it had 
guaranteed to them in perpetuity. 

They were perfectly right in this. It was under the 
guarantees of personal liberty and self-government which 
that charter gave them — not temporarily but for all 



142 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

time — that they had crossed a tempestuous sea and 
taken upon themselves the risks, the dangers and the 
hardships of colonists in order to build up an English 
nation on these shores. They had fulfilled, and more 
than fulfilled, their part of the contract. They were 
entirely right, therefore, in declining to recognize a 
decree depriving them of their liberties. Such annul- 
ment of their charter robbed them of their share of the 
contract benefits, while leaving the king and the English 
government in full enjoyment of all that they had gained 
from the endeavors, the endurance and the suffering of 
the men and women of Massachusetts. These men 
thus early asserted a doctrine now firmly fixed in law 
that a charter is a contract and that when one party to 
it has rendered benefits, the other cannot annul it. 

In the year 1685 King Charles II died, and his 
brother became king, as James II. He decided at 
once to carry out the policy of centralizing the colonies 
and ruling them in accordance with his own arbitrary 
will. He therefore appointed Sir Edmund Andros, who 
had before been governor of New York, to be governor 
of New York, New Jersey and all of New England. 

Andros was a zealous despot, loyal to the king and 
disposed slavishly to do his will, but without sense 
enough to see or to understand the conditions that pre- 
vailed in the country he had been sent out to govern. 
He therefore ruled in the sole interest of his master, as 
any other such despot might have done, levying taxes 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 143 

without warrant, and interfering in a hundred annoying 
ways with the chartered and traditional Uberties of the 
people. By the king's command he was fully author- 
ized to do all that he did, but he was none the less fool- 
ish to do it, in view of the fact that the people in 
America objected to it and that they had the physical 
power to enforce their objection, so far at least as he 
was personally concerned. 

Among other things that he did, by way of establish- 
ing a centralized despotism, Andros undertook to secure 
possession of the charters of Connecticut and Rhode 
Island. But the charter of Rhode Island was resolutely 
withheld from his grasp by a devoted people and when 
he went before the general assembly of Connecticut 
and demanded the surrender of the charter of that 
colony, the debate on the subject was purposely pro- 
longed until late in the evening. Presently some one 
blew out all the candles in the assembly chamber and 
when they were rekindled the charter had disappeared. 
It was hidden, as we now know, by some one connected 
with the assembly, in the hollow of a decaying oak tree 
which was thereafter known and honored as the '' Charter 
Oak " of Connecticut. 

A little later a revolution occurred in England and 
the king, James II, was driven from the throne into 
exile. Even before news of this event reached New 
England the people of Massachusetts made up their minds 
that they would no longer tolerate the despotism of 



144 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

Andros. They arrested him, imprisoned him, and pres- 
ently sent him back to England, there to mind his own 
business. 

During all this time influences of a like kind had been 
at work in the other colonies. Under James II all the 
ofificeholders in New York were rich and aristocratic 
personages, disposed to trample upon the feelings of the 
plainer people of that colony. The people resented this, 
and the troubles in England presently gave them op- 
portunity to express their opinions in a vigorous fashion. 

For a prolonged period the question of succession to 
the throne in England had been complicated by a great 
religious controversy involving much of persecution and 
still more of disturbance of the public mind. Since the 
days when Henry VIII had declared himself the head 
of the church and made England Protestant, there had 
been a succession of changes which involved a grievous 
disturbance of the nation and at times the sore affliction 
of the people. Edward VI, Henry's son, who succeeded 
him on the throne in 1547, was a Protestant. Henry 
VIII's daughter, Mary, who became queen in 1553, was 
a Catholic and a person of intolerant mind. At the end 
of her reign, Henry's other daughter, Elizabeth, came to 
the throne, in 1558. She was a Protestant and quite as 
intolerant in opinion on her side of the controversy as 
her sister Mary had been on the other, though she was 
less severe in her dealings with her opponents. Elizabeth 
reigned long and the result of her reign was pretty firmly 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 145 

to establish Protestant doctrines in England. Then had 
followed James I, and Charles I, under whom the country 
was continually vexed by religious controversy. Then 
came the Commonwealth in 1649 which was not only 
Protestant but Puritan in its religion. After that there 
was the Restoration in 1660 with Charles II and James II 




The Middle Colonies. 



following as kings, under whom the most grievous of- 
fence was given to the Protestant and especially to the 
Puritan sentiment of the realm. 

All these things had tended to arouse in England a 
bitter religious controversy involving the confiscation of 
J 



146 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

estates, the chopping off of the heads of men and women, 
and other scarcely less disagreeable consequences. The 
people had in the main become Protestant and in order 
to prevent a further religious controversy between Cath- 
olics and Protestants the English people, when James II 
was driven into exile, decided to call Queen Mary, and 
her husband, William of Orange — both Protestants — to 
the throne. They decreed also that thereafter no Cath- 
olic should be king of England, however legitimately his 
birth might entitle him to the succession. 

Without waiting to find out what the policy of Wil- 
liam and Mary in the colonies might be the people of 
New York rose in rebellion against all that had been 
done under King James and especially against the Catho- 
lic influence. They armed themselves and gathered as 
a mob in the streets resolved to overthrow the colonial 
government under which they were living. 

There was at that time in New York one Jacob Leis- 
ler. Leisler was a patriot and a born leader of men, 
though at times reckless and intemperate in his acts. 
The people called upon him to become their chieftain 
and under his command they seized upon Fort James, 
which dominated the city, attacked the theater as the 
pleasure house of their oppressors and organized a new 
government with Leisler at its head. 

All this was irregular of course and even revolutionary, 
but the colonists at this exciting time did not pay a great 
deal of attention to regularity or to legal technicalities. 



EARLY REBELLION FOR TPIE RIGHT 147 

They had notions of their own with regard to their rights 
of self-government. 

They decided therefore that their new government 
should continue in New York until some intimation 
should come from the new king and queen in England 
as to what their will might be with regard to the colony. 

Leisler was a good man and a patriot but he was in 
many ways indiscreet, arbitrary and arrogant. He pro- 
claimed himself the lieutenant governor, but the new 
king and queen in England refused to recognize his au- 
thority. They therefore sent out a new royal governor 
to take his place. Had Leisler been a prudent man he 
would have recognized the new royal governor as his 
successor, holding that he had himself held the reins of 
government only temporarily and until his successor 
should be appointed. But Leisler had had a taste of 
power and was disposed to continue in authority. He 
therefore resisted the new governor by force of arms. 
He was at once arrested and tried on a charge of treason. 
He was convicted and hanged by order of the governor 
when the governor was drunk. Leisler was afterwards 
honored by a monument. 

In Virginia a good deal had been occurring during 
this period. That colony had grown mightily and pros- 
pered in all its industries. It had extended its planta- 
tions in every direction, and had built up a material 
prosperity which made of its government a prize worth 
even a king's seeking. There had come to it year by 



148 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

year a large migration composed in the main of far better 
men than those who had originally settled the colony. 
Especially there had come to it, between 1 649 and 1 660 
— the period of Puritan domination in England — a con- 
siderable company of the men called " Cavaliers " — the 
adherents of the king, who were driven out of England 
by Puritan oppression there. 

Thus as the Puritans had before been compelled to 
emigrate to America in order to escape persecution for 
conscience's sake, so now the opponents of Puritanism, 
driven out of England by Puritan oppression, sought 
liberty of life and conscience in this land of refuge. The 
fact is interesting as showing how confidently all men, 
of every faith, looked to America in that time as a coun- 
try in which liberty was a thing of native and spontaneous 
growth. This Cavalier immigration gave character to 
Virginia and determined the traditions of that colony 
for a century or more afterwards. 

The Cavaliers were men of gallant thought and life. 
They were brave, self-sacrificing, men whose controlling 
impulse was the sentiment of unflinching courage and 
uncompromising honor. Their numbers were sufficient 
to give an impress of their spirit and principles of con- 
duct to the colony, and later to the state that the colony 
became in the American union. 

By this time, and under impulse of this immigration of 
well to do men, great plantations had been opened all 
over the settled region and even far to the west. Men 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 149 

of capacity and distinction — some of them even men of 
wealth — had become the proprietors of these planta- 
tions. It was reported by an English writer of the time, 
who knew Virginia well, that there were many planters 
there who lived in greater state than men in England 
could who had incomes of four thousand pounds a year. 
Under that form of local self-government which had 
been conceded to the colony in the Great Charter, it 
*had developed a company of statesmen as abundantly 
capable as those of Massachusetts had proved themselves 




The Virginia penny. 

to be, of governing the colony wisely and well. They 
had made peace with the Indians and they had kept 
that peace. Little by little the fruitful lands of the 
upper as well as the lower James River regions had 
been brought under cultivation and the colony had be- 
come, as that of Massachusetts had, a self-sustaining 
commonwealth capable of caring for its own interests in 
a wise and resolute way, without any assistance from 
king or company. 

As early as 1624 the Virginia colony had been taken 
out of the control of its London proprietors and placed 



150 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

directly under the authority of the king of England. In 
1629 the king, Charles I, sent out Sir John Harvey to act 
as royal governor of Virginia. He was in many ways a 
person objectionable to the colonists. He ruled arbitra- 
rily and he had no conception of the spirit in which 
the Virginians insisted upon their rights as Englishmen. 
Worse still he totally failed to understand the conditions 
and needs of the colony. 

After a little while the Virginia legislative council 
sent him back to England, and preferred charges of mis- 
government against him there. This act of theirs proved 
to be offensive to the arrogant king, whose disposition 
it was to resent any assertion of independent right or 
privilege on the part of the colonists. He held his own 
will to be supreme, and it angered him that the colonists 
should venture to question the authority of a man chosen 
by him to govern them. Here again, as in the case of 
Andros in New England, there was involved the ques- 
tion whether these Englishmen in America should gov- 
ern themselves — as by agreement they were privileged 
to do — or whether they should be governed arbitrarily 
by some agent of the king of a country which they had 
come to regard as in a measure foreign to themselves. 

All these things were leading up slowly but certainly 
to that American Revolution which more than a hundred 
years later created this great republic of ours. 

Resenting the act of the Virginians, King Charles 
sent Harvey back to Virginia in the next year with au- 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 151 

thority to govern that colony practically as he pleased. 
He encountered much difficulty in doing so, but he 
succeeded in retaining his office for three years, when 
the king, beginning to realize the mistake he had made, 
called him back to England 

In 1642 the king sent out Sir William Berkeley to 
be governor of Virginia. During this, his first term of 
office, Berkeley seems to have ruled sufficiently well to 
win the favor of the Virginians. He continued to rule the 
colony until 1649, when Cromwell's Commonwealth was 
estabHshed in England and permitted almost entire self- 
government to the Virginians. The Virginians thought 
so well of Berkeley that when the restoration of the 
Stuarts to the English throne occurred, eleven years 
later, they elected Berkeley their governor by vote of 
their assembly, and Charles II, who about that time be- 
came king in England, commissioned him as such. 

Berkeley, who had ruled fairly well before, ruled very 
ill at this time. The greed of gain had taken possession 
of him, and he set to work to make his own fortune at 
the expense of the welfare of the colonists. He entered 
largely into the fur trade as a personal speculation and 
made large profits from it, sometimes in legal, and some- 
times in illegal ways. The continuance of the fur trade 
of course depended upon the maintenance of peace with 
the Indians, and so Berkeley made up his mind to pre- 
serve that peace at all hazards and at all costs to the 
colonists, in the interest of his own profits. 



152 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

By this time the Virginians had opened plantations 
far up James River, and elsewhere in the interior, remote 
from the center of the colony and exposed of course to 
Indian depredations should trouble arise. There had 
come into the colony many men who had means enough 
to build mansions for themselves and with the aid of the 
negro and white slaves who had multiplied in the colony, 
to make of themselves a sort of Lords of the Manor liv- 
ing in luxury and exercising an influence like that of a 
great English estate owner. Among these great planters 
was a young man named Nathaniel Bacon. He was a 
man of good English family who had come out to Vir- 
ginia and estabished a large plantation on the upper part 
of James River. He had been thoroughly educated ; he 
had high character ; and he had become a man of recog- 
nized importance in the colony. He had gained great 
popularity by his winning manners and by his eloquence in 
speech. He had therefore been made a member of the 
council of the governor in 1672 and had become one of 
its most influential members, not only by reason of his 
character, his education and his wealth, but still more 
by reason of the popular favor which he enjoyed. His 
plantation lay well forward on the frontier and it was 
one of the first of those which the Indians, when they 
became hostile, attacked. 

This outbreak of the Indians was one that had not 
been foreseen and the colonists, who had established 
plantations in every direction in full faith that the 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 153 

Indians would not break the peace which had so long 
existed, found their interests and their hves, and even 
the lives of their women and children imperiled. 

They appealed at once to Governor Berkeley, whose 
reactionary policy had caused great discontent, to or- 
ganize a military force for their protection. But Gov- 
ernor Berkeley was so deeply interested in the illicit 
profits of his fur trade with the Indians that he refused 
even to organize the colony for self-defence. By this 
time however the Virginians — like the men of Mas- 
sachusetts — had learned to take care of themselves. Ac- 
cordingly when their royal governor refused to them 
the protection which the colony was amply able to 
afford, they decided to protect themselves. They or- 
ganized a little army, but they had no leader for it. 
They called upon Bacon to assume the leadership, but 
he, being a member of the governor's council, felt that 
it would be improper for him to do so without the 
authority of the governor. He therefore asked Gov- 
ernor Berkeley for a commission to command this army 
and to defend the borders against the Indians. This 
the governor, in pursuit of his selfish financial ends, 
refused. But Bacon was persuaded at last to visit the 
camp of the little colonial army. When he did so the 
whole body of men rose in enthusiasm and fairly com- 
pelled him to become their leader. He took command 
at once and proceeded to defeat the Indians. 

This was a criminal offence in the eyes of Governor 



154 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

Berkeley, and that official immediately denounced Bacon 
in a public proclamation as a rebel against the royal 
authority in the colony. Berkeley even went further 
than this. He sent out a force to fight Bacon and cap- 
ture him. Bacon promptly surrendered to these officers, 
feeling that he was justified in all his actions, if not by 
virtue of English authority, at least by virtue of the suf- 
frages of his fellow men in the colony. He was tried 
as a rebel and acquitted of all charges. He was restored 
to his seat in the governor's council, by verdict of his 
fellow colonists in authority, and Berkeley promised him 
a commission as general in command of the forces raised 
to resist the Indians. 

The governor, however, arbitrarily refused to obey the 
decree of the court which had been summoned to try 
Bacon as a rebel or to fulfill his own promise with respect 
to the commission. In the meanwhile the rigors of 
Governor Berkeley's rule had angered all of the colonists. 
He had raised the rates of taxation. He had attempted 
to curtail the franchise, putting out from it many men 
who were entitled to it by the fundamental law of the 
land. He had done many other things that angered the 
populace and, above all, his refusal to organize the col- 
ony for defence against Indian outbreaks had rendered 
him obnoxious to all the colonists. There was such an 
uprising of the people that even Governor Berkeley, with 
all his arrogance, dared not resist it. He yielded to it 
at last and issued a commission as a general to Nathan- 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 155 

iel Bacon, authorizing him to protect the borders of the 
Virginia colony against all Indian aggressions. 

Bacon immediately marched against the Indians and 
overcame them, but at every point he was interfered with 
by Governor Berkeley who had tried in every way he 
could to withhold from the defender the forces necessary 
to his work. Berkeley had from the first regarded and 
treated Bacon as a rebel in arms, in spite of the fact that 
the young colonist bore a commission signed by the gov- 
ernor himself. 

Now let us understand. The colony was threatened 
with destruction at the hands of the Indians. The people 
of the colony must either defend themselves or surrender 
their settlements, abandon their plantations and withdraw 
from the country after a period of slaughter including 
women and children. Governor Berkeley held his office 
as the guardian and protector of this colony. For the 
sake of his own interests and his own pecuniary gain he 
had utterly failed to discharge his duties as governor. 
After the growing manner of that time the people had 
taken the question of self-defence into their own hands. 
They had organized an army of their own and by their 
unanimous choice they had made Nathaniel Bacon the 
commander of that army. The governor had contended 
that in accepting such command Bacon had made of 
himself a rebel. Upon that issue Bacon had surrendered 
himself to the authorities and had submitted to a trial on 
the false charges brought against him by the royal gov- 



156 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

ernor. He had been unanimously acquitted. He had 
then received from the governor himself, under compulsion 
of public sentiment, a commission to command the colo- 
nial army in defence of the colony and he had done so 
successfully. He had marched all the way from the 
region below Richmond to the Roanoke River and had 
there met and crushed the Indian power. When he re- 
turned he found himself again denounced as a rebel by 
this extraordinary governor and deposed from his place 
as a member of the governor's council. 

At last, in despair, and realizing that he represented 
the authority of the people as against the arbitrary rule 
of a selfish royal governor whose authority was completely 
foreign to the colony. Bacon turned upon Berkeley and 
assailed Jamestown itself, the capital of the colony. He 
drove Berkeley down the river and across Chesapeake 
Bay to Accomac on the eastern shore of Virginia. When 
Berkeley returned a month later, still in unyielding mood. 
Bacon again captured Jamestown and burned the place 
after driving Berkeley to his ships in the river. 

This was in fact a premature but actual beginning of 
the American Revolution. It occurred almost exactly a 
hundred years before its time, but it was precisely the 
same expression of the American sentiment in behalf of 
independence and self-government which later found ex- 
pression at Lexington and Concord and in all the war 
that followed. 

Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately, inasmuch as 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 157 

the colonies were not then strong enough to contend suc- 
cessfully against the English power — Bacon fell ill about 
this time and died. As there was no other leader ca- 
pable of carrying out his work, his rebellion came to noth- 
ing. The governor proceeded to enrich himself enor- 
mously by confiscating the estates of those who had 
served with Bacon, and to gratify his bloodthirsty 
revengefulness by hanging no less than twenty-three of 
them — some of whom were the flower of the colony. At 
this point Charles II interposed with an authoritative 
command that the confiscations and the executions should 
cease. He called attention to the fact that for this 
little, and thoroughly justified, rebellion in Virginia, 
more men had been hanged than he had himself sent to 
the block for the dethronement and decapitation of his 
father. Berkeley was recalled in disgrace and for a time 
thereafter the Virginians enjoyed a considerable meas- 
ure of self-government. 

The Virginians were by this time living very comfort- 
ably. The rich men among them, as we have seen, had 
become great lords of the soil, living in luxury and state. 
The merely well to do had estabHshed plantations and 
homes, opened fields and begun to grow rich by their in- 
dustry. Even those who were less prosperous lived in 
comfort on smaller but still sufficient plantations. 
Apart from the white and black slaves, there were 
scarcely any people in the colony who could be called 
poor. There were among them men of high spirit 



158 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

whose code of conduct was of the best and whose influ- 
ence served to impress that code of conduct upon all 
other men in the colony at that time. To pay one's 
debts, to fulfill one's obligations of every kind, and to be 
hospitable to all comers, were fundamental articles in 
their creed of conduct. Their soil was rich, their cli- 
mate was altogether favorable and under these condi- 
tions they were speedily making themselves as com- 
pletely independent and as completely masters of their 
own surroundings, as if their estates had been ancestral 
domains in England. 

They were a proud race, loving liberty, and determined 
to maintain it at all costs and at all hazards. No great 
baron in all England, no lord of the manor, no owner of 
half an English shire, had ever enjoyed a greater inde- 
pendence, or indeed so great an independence, as these 
men did in the execution of their will. The era of gen- 
tlemen's rule had come in Virginia and it proved to 
be an important factor in the later history of the colo- 
nies and of their relations with Great Britain. 

The conditions in Virginia were altogether different 
from those that prevailed in Massachusetts at that time, 
but they tended to like results whenever there should 
come a controversy between the mother country and the 
colonies. Underlying the conditions in both colonies 
was the resolute sentiment of independence which had 
taken root in all the colonies, the conviction of the right 
of men and of communities to govern themselves, the 



EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 159 

feeling that any government from the outside of them- 
selves was an impertinence to be resented and resisted 
without much regard to consequences. 

Thus the two colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, 
developed under totally different conditions of climate, 
soil and government, had reached the common conclu- 
sion, even a hundred years before the outbreak of the 
American Revolution, that nobody on the face of the 
earth had or could have a right to govern them with- 
out their own consent, and when the time for resolute 
resistance came, these two colonies, with all that lay be- 
tween them, united in a manful struggle to assert this 
doctrine, and they asserted it successfully. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 

WHILE the English were making all these settle- 
ments and building up all these colonies within 
what is now the United States, the French were 
establishing themselves north of the English colonies, 
and their settlements there were destined later to influ- 
ence in important ways the development of English power 
on this continent, and ultimately the upbuilding of these 
United States of ours. 

As early as 1603 — four years before the landing at 
Jamestown — the French explorer Champlain, sailed up 
the St. Lawrence to what is now the site of Montreal, 
and explored the country north and south of that region. 
In the year 1608 — a year after Jamestown was colonized 
— he founded a settlement at Quebec which proved ul- 
timately to be the beginning of the French power in 
America and the beginning of a long series of events 
which involved the American colonies in wars and troubles 
of every kind. 

For twenty-seven years after the founding of Quebec, 
Champlain continued to be the governor of the F'rench 
in America. The French who came over with him and 
160 



THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 



161 




those who followed him into that region were in the main 
not settlers or farmers, or colonizers, but traders and 
priests. The traders came out to buy furs from the 
Indians in exchange for trinkets, and the priests came 
out with the religious purpose of converting the Indians 
to Christianity. Wherever the trader went the priest 
went also, and often the priest went 
where the trader dared not go. 

The French traders were an ac- 
commodating sort of people who 
dwelt among the Indians without 
objecting in any way to their dirt 
or their uncomfortable ways of liv- 
ing. They made friends with the 
Indians from the beginning. The 
priests were even more accommodating. They were a 
brave company of devoted men who were ready, in pur- 
suit of their religious purpose, to endure any hardship, 
encounter any danger, and put aside all thoughts of the 
disagreeable, in order that they might rescue the souls 
of the Indians from such damnation as heathenism, in 
their belief, implied. Many of them lived among the In- 
dians in the Indian ways, adopting even the most dis- 
agreeable of the Indian practices and devoting themselves 
solely to the salvation of the Indians' souls. 

The Frenchmen at first did almost nothing toward 
establishing farming settlements. This was due in large 
part to the inhospitality of the cHmate and soil of Canada. 



Champlain. 



162 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



But it was due in still larger part to the fact that the 
French traders were bent upon immediate gain rather 
than upon ultimate profit from settlement. These 
Frenchmen, traders and priests alike, rapidly pushed their 
explorations up the. St. Lawrence, through the Great 
Lakes, and onward to the Mississippi itself. They 
preached and traded as they went, 
but they were moved in part by 
the hope of finding somewhere 
that water way through America 
to Asia which had been the lure 
of all other adventurers ever since 
Columbus had found a continent 
standing in the way. 

They did not find that water 
way of course, for the simple rea- 
son that it did not exist. But 
they did find a vast and fertile 
territory west of the Alleghenies which they later took 
possession of as a French domain. Had they been able 
permanently to hold that great valley of the Mississippi 
and its tributaries, the English colonies in America, all 
of which lay mainly east of the Allegheny Mountains, 
could never have built up on this continent the great 
republic of which we are all proud to be citizens. The 
story of the French expulsion from the Mississippi valley 
belongs to a later period of history. 

Another thing that the French were doing all this 




French Coureur des Bois. 



THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 163 

time was fishing on the banks of Newfoundland and in 
the waters east of the English colonies. The people of 
New England also employed themselves largely in fish- 
ing. Their climate and soil did not greatly tempt men 
to farming or stock raising, and so the men of that re- 
gion, as we have seen in a former chapter, with shrewd 
intelligence, began to build ships and to man them for 
use in the profitable industry of fishing for cod and 
mackerel in those seas in which such fish abound. This 
circumstance led ultimately to important consequences, 
as we shall see later. For one thing it prompted New 
England carpenters to learn how to build stout and fleet 
ships out of the superb timber which abounded in their 
country, and it prompted the young men of New Eng- 
land to become expert sailors, skilled in all the arts of 
navigation, and as bold upon the sea as ever the vikings 
of Scandinavia had been. 

These circumstances, unimportant as they may seem 
upon this simple statement, were destined to bring rich 
historical fruits at a later day. It was out of this train- 
ing of the New England shipbuilders and the sturdy 
young New England sailors that later came a great com- 
merce which enriched the country. It was out of the 
same influence that still later came the building up of 
an improvised American navy which was able to hold 
its own, and more than its own, against the sea power 
of the greatest maritime nation in the world. 

The Yankee boys of that time began their sea careers 



164 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

so early and brought to bear upon their art so great a 
shrewdness that they were able in many cases to com- 
mand ships and sail them profitably all over the world 
before the young captains on the poop deck had attained 
even the age of twenty years. 

It is recorded of one of them, R. J. Cleveland, that 
he was a ship captain at eighteen and that he went in 
command of his ship, with not a man on board who had 
passed his twentieth year, to the Orient, to South Africa, 
to the west coast o'f South America and elsewhere, at a 
time when pirates infested the seas and when international 
complications were such as to require of every ship- 
master the utmost ingenuity in order to avoid the seiz- 
ure and condemnation of his ship and cargo. It was 
from such a company of very young men, trained from 
childhood to the service of the sea, and trained also in 
resolution, ingenuity and resourcefulness, that both our 
mercantile marine and our navy were recruited in times 
of need. 

All this is getting far ahead of our story. 

It was the purpose of the French traders and mission- 
aries to push their posts far into the interior, slowly 
building them up into a chain without a missing link. 
They passed through all the great lakes and made their 
way west as far as what is now Wisconsin, establishing 
posts as they went, each of which could communicate with 
those in rear and those in front of it. 

Among the French explorers were two who especially 



THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 



165 



distinguished themselves by their discoveries. One of 
these was JoUet, a trader, and the other, Father Marquette, 
a priest and missionary. The Indians had told the French 
of a great river that lay far to the west and Joliet and 
Marquette were sent to find it. They passed down the 
Wisconsin River in birch bark canoes and reached the 
mouth of that stream where it enters the Mississippi in 
June, 1673. Thence they went on down the great river 
until they believed they were nearing its mouth in the 
Gulf of Mexico. They knew that there was serious dan- 
ger of encountering hostile Spaniards at the mouth of 
the river and so they decided to turn back. They had 
in fact gone only to the neighborhood of the mouth of the 
Arkansas River, several hundred 
miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. 

This was the first exploration 
ever made by white men of that 
greatest of rivers, the Mississippi. 

Joliet and Marquette toil- 
somely paddled their canoes 
back again against the strong 
current of the Mississippi, and 
four months after the beginning 
of their explorations they again reached Lake Michi- 
gan. 

About seven years earlier than this, however, in 1 666, 
a young Frenchman, La Salle, had arrived in Canada and 
after learning something of the methods of French ex- 




La Salle. 



166 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

I^loration he set out, in 1669, on a voyage of discovery 
made at his own expense. He, too, had heard of the great 
river that lay to the west, but he took a different route 
by way of finding it. Instead of going westward, as JoHet 
and Marquette did later, he directed his steps southward 
until he reached the Ohio, at what point we do not know. 
From that point, whatever it may have been, he de- 
scended the river as far as the falls at Louisville. When 
his journey was done, he had not discovered the Missis- 
sippi, but he had at least traversed the upper waters of its 
greatest eastern affluent, and he was enthusiastic in his 
determination to make his way further, and to plant the 
flag of France at the very mouth of the Mississippi it- 
self. Accordingly he started again by the Ohio River 
route in 1681 and during the next year succeeded in 
reaching the mouth of the Mississippi. There he took 
possession in the name of the French king, Louis XIV, 
planted a column to testify to his discovery and in behalf 
of the king he claimed dominion over all the region 
watered by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. 

That region includes all the country that lies between 
the Allegheny Mountains on the east, the Rocky Moun- 
tains on the west, the Great Lakes on the north, and the 
Gulf of Mexico on the south. There was at that time 
nowhere in the world an empire so vast, or one so rich and 
varied in soil and climate, or in its undiscovered mineral 
wealth, as was this region of which La Salle made his 
king the proprietor. 



THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 167 

La Salle named the region Louisiana, in honor of his 
king, Louis XIV. In the meanwhile a French Cath- 
olic missionary. Father Hennepin, had completed the 
work of Mississippi River discovery by exploring the 
upper waters of the river as far north as the spot on which 
Minneapolis now stands. 

It has already been explained that in the main the 
French made friends with the Indians, lived among 
them, and traded with them upon the most amicable 
terms. Many of the French traders married Indian 
squaws and from these unions came a multitude of half- 
breeds who were equally French and Indian. The 
French priests were everywhere recognized by the In- 
dians as their friends and everywhere their influence 
over the Indians was supreme. This was in part due 
to the kindness of the priests toward the savages, but 
perhaps in still larger part it was due to the fact that the 
Indians recognized and honored the courage of these 
priests, who, without arms in their hands or any kind of 
defence, boldly went into the remotest Indian countries 
and there preached their gospel of good will among 
men. 

Whatever other good or bad qualities the Indians may 
have had they were brave almost to a fault and they 
honored courage wherever they saw it. These French 
priests had a courage such as the Indians had never else- 
where seen among white men and so they honored the 
priests and accepted their ministry in a degree in which 



168 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



they had never accepted any other interference with 
their affairs on the part of the white men. 

There was one important exception to all this, how- 
ever. When Champlain, in 1608, settled Quebec and 
made friends with the Indians about him, he found those 
Indians at war with the Mohawks in what is now New 
York state. He made the mistake of aiding with French 
soldiery these Indian allies of his in their war against 
the Mohawks. The French and Indians succeeded in 
defeating the Mohawks in a battle 
fought near Lake Champlain. But 
the Mohawks were one of the " Five 
Nations " — of which the Iroquois 
confederacy, the most powerful 
league of Indians ever formed — was 
composed. Champlain' s unwise in- 
terference in this quarrel of the In- 
dians converted the whole Iroquois 
French gentleman. confederacy into enemies of the 
French and strengthened the friendship that already ex- 
isted between the Iroquois tribes, who occupied central 
New York, and the Dutch, and afterwards the English 
colonists of the Hudson River country. 

This quarrel, unfortunately for the French, created a 
permanent hostility which was destined to bear bitter 
fruit in the future. It was the custom of the Iroquois 
to carry all their furs and skins to Albany and there 
to trade them for such goods as they wanted to the 




THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 169 

English and Dutch traders of that region. This trade 
was profitable to both parties, but after a while the Iro- 
quois found that their territory did not yield them as 
many beaver skins and other furs as they desired, and 
so in 1680 — still cherishing their old enmity to the 
French, which had had its origin about seventy years 
before, they decided to conquer the richer fur-bearing 
regions to the north and west of them, which were pos- 
sessed by Indians allied with the French. From that 
time forward the French were continually vexed by 
attacks from the powerful Iroquois and by their inva- 
sions of the territory that had previously been wholly 
tributary to French trade. 

Almost from the beginning the English colonists, and 
especially those of New York and New England, had 
regarded the French in Canada as enemies. There was 
a never ending quarrel between the two over questions 
relating to the fur trade and, as it went on, over ques- 
tions relating to the possession of the region west of the 
AUeghenies and south of the Great Lakes. In addition 
to these causes of quarrel there were others respecting 
land claims and still others of an even more acrimonious 
sort concerning the fisheries. In brief, there was a con- 
dition of feeling amounting almost to open warfare be- 
tween the Enghsh colonies on the south and the French 
colonies north of the dividing line. 

In the end these causes of quarrel led to some of the 
most important events in American history. They led at 



170 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

last to the conquest by the English colonists of all Canada 
and all that fruitful region between the Alleghenies and 
the Mississippi which now includes the states of Ohio, In- 
diana, lUinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennes- 
see, Alabama and Mississippi. The French held all of 
that great river valley then — near the end of the seven- 
teenth century. They continued to hold it and to de- 
fend it for many years afterward, but in the end they 
lost it all in a contest with the obstinate persistency of 
the Englishmen of the colonies, and still later they 
lost all Canada to the English. Those events, however, 
belong to a later period of history. 



CHAPTER XVII 

RAPINE, SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 

THE contest between the English and the French 
colonists in America was embarrassed at every 
point by the fact that England and France equally 
regarded colonial interests as of no particular consequence. 
Those two European nations were sometimes at war and 
sometimes at peace with each other. When they were at 
war the colonists of the one and of the other nation were 
permitted to fight each other as freely as they pleased. 
But when the two European nations concluded to make 
peace with each other they forbade their colonists to 
continue the war on this side of the ocean, and usually 
each of them completely neglected to include colonial 
interests in the terms of such settlements as they made. 
That is to say, they made their own peace with sole 
reference to European interests and each of them freely 
gave up everything that the colonists on this side of the 
ocean might feel to be of vital interest to their own 
welfare. The time had not yet arrived when the states- 
men of England and France could understand that great 
nations were building themselves up in America and that 
their rights and interests were as important as those 

^ 171 



172 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

which were in controversy between England and France 
in Europe. 

But while the Englishmen in New York and New 
England and the Frenchmen in Canada, in all times of 
peace between England and France, were forbidden by 
their home governments to carry on war in behalf of 
their own rights and interests, the enmity between them 
continued, and the contest was carried on by the Indians 
allied with the one or with the other. It was marked 
by massacre and every species of horror. Behind these 
Indian incursions and massacres of the settlers on either 
side, there was always the hatred on the part of the 
whites, as an instigation to such savage warfare. 

Presently, however, there came open war again between 
England and France. When James II was driven from 
the throne of England his cause was championed by 
Louis XIV of France. War ensued, of course, between 
the two great European powers and their colonies in 
America were again permitted to fight each other on this 
side of the ocean. 

This was in 1 689 and the struggle is known in history 
as King William's war. The French king sent out Count 
Frontenac, one of the greatest soldiers of his time, to be 
governor of the French possessions in America. It was 
his task to fight the Enghsh and the Iroquois who were 
in alliance with the English, and to recover for France 
the fur trade which it had largely lost. 

His operations began in midwinter, or, to be more 



SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 173 

exact, in February, when all the conditions were unfa- 
vorable to campaigning. But Count Frontenac was a 
bold soldier who paid little attention to conditions and 
none at all to difficulties, except to meet and overcome 
them. He therefore proceeded at once to send out 
three expeditions against the English and their Indian 
allies. The first of these expeditions set out in 1690 
from Montreal with orders to force its way to Albany 
and to take that town and the forts that protected it. 

The commander of the expedition was far less resolute 
and courageous than Count Frontenac and so he hes- 
itated to assail the strong post at Albany. Instead of 
that he diverted his march toward Schenectady, a few 
miles northwest of Albany, fell upon that village in 
a night attack, and committed a butchery there which 
included men, women and children, without discrimina- 
tion. 

A little later Count Frontenac sent out other parties, 
of what in our day we should call raiders, to assail and 
destroy the settlements in New England ; and a little 
later still he sent out his third party, which united with 
the second one and worked havoc in various settlements 
in New Hampshire and in Maine. 

The methods of warfare at that time were based upon 
the idea of pure butchery and unlimited destruction. 
Consequently when a village was overcome its houses 
were burned, its people of both sexes and all ages were 
slaughtered, and those who were spared were carried away 



174 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



into a captivity which was scarcely less terrible than the 
butchery itself. 

In the meanwhile the English colonists were not idle, 
though they had no commander fit to cope with such a 
soldier as Frontenac. In May, 1690, a congress of the 
English colonists was held in New York and it ordered 
attacks upon Montreal and Quebec, but these operations 
came to little because of incapable leadership. The ex- 
pedition against Montreal, after attacking some French 
settlements, retired without accomplishing anything of 
consequence. The movement upon Quebec was com- 
manded by no less a person than Sir William Phips, who 




Matchlock gun and matchlock, 

had a little while before captured Port Royal and the 
province of Acadia. Sir William succeeded in taking his 
ships to Quebec but he failed in his effort to capture that 
stronghold. 

During the next year an expedition was sent out from 



SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 175 

Albany, under the leadership of Peter Schuyler, to ravage 
French settlements. But Schuyler failed of his purpose 
and escaped destruction only by accident and by desper- 
ate fighting. 

Thus for eight years King William's war continued with 
ravage and slaughter as its incidents in every direction. 
At Schenectady, for example, about sixty people were 
killed including men, women and children, indiscrimi- 
nately, for at that time neither the Indians nor many of 
their Canadian French allies had become sufficiently gal- 
lant soldiers to refuse to make war upon women and chil- 
dren. Worse still, many of the people of Schenectady, 
including women and children, were carried off into cap- 
tivity, some of them into Indian captivity, a fate deemed 
by the colonists to be more horrible than any massacre 
could be. 

A little later a party of French and Indians, sent out 
by Count Frontenac, assailed Salmon Falls, in New 
Hampshire, killed and captured nearly all of its inhabit- 
ants and burned the little town to ashes. A little later 
still, the French and Indians destroyed a small settle- 
ment called Fort Loyal, in Maine, with a like butchery 
of its people. 

It must be borne in mind, if the reader would under- 
stand these things, that the settlements of the English 
were usually very small and widely separated — too small 
to defend themselves successfully against such assaults 
as these, and too widely separated to co-operate with each 



176 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

other for a common defence. It was butchery, plain and 
smiple, and all of the colonists had been schooled by ex- 
perience to live in constant dread of such assaults from 
their French and Indian enemies. How brave they were 
and how enduring, to live in such conditions as these ! 
And how greatly we should honor the courage of the 
men, the women and the children who faced such dan- 
gers in the hope of building up here in America a coun- 
try of their own, and of planting here that liberty which 
they had crossed the ocean to seek. 

Not only had they come across the seas to better them- 
selves, to secure liberty of conscience, and to build up 
homes for their children and grandchildren after them, 
but after they had landed they had had resolution 
enough, and courage enough, and endurance enough to 
separate themselves in little bodies from the more de- 
fensible colonial settlements, and to go off into the 
wilderness, usually under the leadership of their pastors, 
and there to risk destruction in an endeavor to estab- 
lish homes for themselves and for those who should 
come after them. 

Among these straggling and undefended settlements 
was the village of York in Maine. There the people 
were attacked during the winter of 1692 by the French 
and Indians, and desolation ensued. More than half the 
people were either killed or taken into captivity. All 
the houses were burned, and all the farms lying round 
about were destroyed. The farm dwellings were reduced 



SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 177 

to ashes, the barns with their precious contents were 
looted, and all the agricultural implements in use in 
the fields were destroyed. 

Two years later the Indians, with French ofificers lead- 
ing them, attacked the little village of Durham in New 
Hampshire, but they were successfully beaten off so far 
as the village itself was concerned, for the reason that 
the people there had built palisades around their homes 




Colonial plow with wooden mold-board, 1706. (Agricultural Museum, 
Albany, N. Y.) 

and were prepared to defend themselves resolutely. But 
all around the village, as was usual at that time, there 
were scattered farmsteads where single families dwelt 
with only such defence as their owners, and the sons of 
their owners, could provide, with the assistance of their 
wives and daughters — for women, as well as men, in those 
days knew how to use a gun and were valiant in their use 
of it for self-defence. These farmsteads resisted with all 
their might, but that might was insufficient to prevent 

L 



178 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

their destruction and desolation. The men, women and 
children occupying them were massacred or carried off 
into captivity. 

Let us not forget, as we enjoy the freedom and security 
of that land which these pioneers built up for us — let 
us never forget the dangers and the hardships they en- 
countered in creating it, or the superb courage they dis- 
played in doing so. 

Thus for eight years the people of New England 
bravely faced a merciless foe and defended their homes 
as best they could against an enemy who recognized no 
distinction of age or sex, who made war equally upon 
men with arms in their hands and upon helpless women 
and children and sick persons — an enemy whose sole 
conception of war was indiscriminate slaughter, an enemy 
to whom arson and rapine seemed legitimate incidents 
of a struggle for political supremacy. 

At last, in 1697, England and France, on the other side 
of the ocean, made peace with each other. In doing so the 
English government jauntily gave up all that the colonists 
in America had won by hard fighting during the struggle. 

Things like this continued to happen throughout 
further colonial history, as we shall see in later volumes 
of this series. The colonies were still regarded by the 
English government as mere feeders of English prosper- 
ity, and their interests were always and everywhere 
treated with neglect and contempt. As we go on with 
this history we shall come to understand how grievously 



SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 179 



the colonists felt this wrong and how ready they were, 
when they grew strong enough, to resent and resist it. 

The seventeenth century ended with peace between 
England and France, but with only a nominal and un- 
certain peace between the colonists of the two nations 
in America and with no provision for the restraining of 
savage Indian warfare upon the settlements on either side. 




p A c 



French Explorations in North America to 1700. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY, AGRICULTURE, TRADE AND 
INTERCOURSE 

KING WILLIAM'S war ended precisely ninety 
years after the first permanent English settlement 
in America was made at Jamestown in Virginia. 

During that time a great work of colonization had been 
effected. From Maine to the Savannah River the 
whole coast had been occupied, and in some degree 
brought under cultivation. Throughout all that region 
the brave and energetic colonists had established them- 
selves firmly, had opened farms and plantations, had 
learned how to take care of themselves, and had pros- 
pered greatly in their affairs. 

At the beginning their ignorance of the climate, 
the soil, and the conditions of life in America had led 
them into many mistakes. Still further they had been 
led astray by the delusion that a passage existed some- 
where through America by which the Pacific Ocean, and 
Asia beyond it, might be reached by ships. They had 
wasted much time at the beginning in a fruitless search 
for gold, and, in New England especially, they had wasted 
180 



EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY 181 

much endeavor in attempts to raise crops for which the 
climate of that region was wholly unfit. 

But they had conquered their own mistakes as well as 
the wilderness in which they dwelt. They had learned 
that so far as the greater part of the country they occu- 
pied was concerned, corn was the natural and necessary 
source of food supply. They had learned from the In- 
dians how to cultivate that grain and how to use it as 
food. They had learned too its value in the fattening 
of such animals as yield food to men. 

They had suffered terribly from Indian assaults and 
still worse toward the latter end of that period, from the 
more skillfully directed assaults of the French and In- 
dians in Canada. Nevertheless, with stout hearts, strong 
arms, and full faith in themselves, they had so far held 
their own that no part of the country they had occupied 
had been conquered, no part of it wrested from their con- 
trol. Wherever they had settled themselves they con- 
tinued to live. 

In all the colonies domestic animals — horses, cattle, 
sheep and hogs — had steadily grown more and more 
numerous under careful management. None of these 
animals were native to America. The Indians had none 
of them and the first herds of each were imported from 
Europe. But the conditions that prevailed in the col- 
onies strongly favored their multiplication — particularly 
that of hogs — and so, by the end of that ninety years' 
period of settlement, all the colonists were well supplied 



182 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

with flocks and herds, and, so far as a food supply was 
concerned, all of them were quite independent of assis- 
tance from Europe. 

The middle colonies were well adapted to the cultiva- 
tion of wheat as well as corn and that species of farming 
had become richly profitable to the settlers there by the 
end of the seventeenth century. Maryland and Virginia 
also successfully cultivated wheat as well as corn and to 
these sources of wealth the people there had added the 
more important one of tobacco. In the Carolinas to- 
bacco was somewhat grown, but as yet neither cotton, 
rice nor indigo had become a crop of general culture. 
The Carolinians at the end of our first century were 
still in a state of experimentation to learn what it was 
best to do with their fruitful climate, their fertile soil and 
their limitless opportunities. 

In New England every effort to find a satisfactory 
staple crop had failed. 

But the shrewd colonists there had found something 
else — two other things indeed — that answered their pur- 
pose quite as well as any food crop could. The seas off 
their coasts and north of them were alive with fish of a 
kind that could be cured and marketed and so the en- 
ergies of the New Englanders were largely directed to 
fishing as a source of wealth not inferior to that of farm- 
ing in the more favorable climates of the colonies south 
of them. In order to fish upon the seas it was neces- 
sary for them to build ships and their carpenters speedily 



EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY 



183 



became expert in that art, while their young men, be- 
ginning as boys, became more than expert in the saiUng 
and management of such ships as they could build. 

All this was done at first in a desultory way, but 
about twenty years after the landing of the Pilgrims, 
circumstances led to the development of shipbuilding as 




Elder Brewster's chair. (In Pilgrim Hall.) 

an important New England industry. The way of it 
was this : When the Puritans came into power in 
England about that time, there was no longer any great 
inducement for men of that faith to migrate to America 
and so the immigration rapidly fell off, and the increase 



184 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

in the population of New England ceased. The farmers 
who were engaged in growing such food crops as New 
England produced, found their market failing them. 
Provisions fell in price until their sale no longer re- 
warded the people who grew them for their labor. Ob- 
viously the men of New England must engage largely 
in something else than farming if they were to thrive as 
they hoped to do. 

At this time one Hugh Peters, the pastor of the 
church at Salem and a born leader of men, began to 
urge his flock to engage in shipbuilding as a definite 
pursuit. In that time and country the pastors of 
churches were by odds the best educated, the ablest and 
the most sagacious men in the community, and their in- 
fluence was well-nigh unbounded. Accordingly, the Rev- 
erend Hugh Peters' s advice was promply taken and the 
people, both of Salem and of Boston, set to work 
building ships, not for fishing purposes only but for use 
in commerce all over the world. The ships they built 
went out first on voyages along the coast and to the West 
Indies, and afterwards to England and to the Mediter- 
ranean. Gradually they extended their voyages to all 
other parts of the world, seeking trade wherever it could 
be found. These ships, and others built in Philadelphia, 
where a like industry had sprung up, carried on a thriv- 
ing trade among the colonies all along the coast, and 
between them and foreign ports. 

Some important results flowed from this change. 



EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY 185 

First of all, the trade up and down the coast brought the 
several widely separated colonies into closer communica- 
tion with each other and laid the foundation for that 
community of purpose and action among them which in 
the next century was destined to make success in the War 
of Independence possible. There were no mails at that 
time passing from one colony to another. There were 
no means of communication by land between the people 
of the northern and the people of the southern col- 
onies. Even the most important happenings in one 
settlement had hitherto remained unknown to the people 
of the other colonies until long after the event, when 
some adventurous traveler might carry inadequate and 
untrustworthy news of them. But when ships from 
New England and Philadelphia began sailing up and down 
the coast and to foreign lands they carried news of inter- 
est and in some respects their news was more impor- 
tant even than their cargoes. 

Other effects of smaller consequence, but still of con- 
sequence, flowed from this change in colonial industries. 
The ships that sailed out of Boston, or Salem, and 
traded with the West Indies brought back sugar and 
rum in large quantities, not only to Boston and to 
Salem, but to other parts of the country as well. As a 
consequence the use of both sugar and rum became gen- 
eral in New England, and somewhat less so in the other 
colonies. 

In those days our present notions of what constitutes 



186 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

temperance were not dreamed of. Pretty nearly every- 
body drank rum upon all festive occasions, and most men 
drank it quite freely. Even clergymen deemed it en- 
tirely fit and proper that they should brace themselves 
for duties to be done, or recuperate themselves after 
duty done, by alcoholic stimulation. Old records show- 
that on every occasion where grave men came together 
to consider and to act upon affairs of church or state, a 
supply of rum for their drinking was deemed as necessary 
as a supply of pens, ink and paper. These men were 
all stern moralists who condemned drunkenness where- 
ever they saw it, but it had not yet occurred to their 
minds that their own example in this more moderate use 
of alcoholic liquor tended to breed drunkenness among 
men of feebler character, and to excuse it there. 

In addition to rum which was imported from the 
West Indies, there was a native drink in New England 
which every farmer could produce for himself at practi- 
cally no cost at all. This was hard cider — a most se- 
ductive and deceptive beverage — which was freely used 
in almost every family and which was consumed in great 
quantities at every time of feasting and even on the 
solemn occasion of funerals. 

The ships that sailed to remoter parts of the world 
brought tea and coffee into the colonies, and so by the 
end of the century, those beverages had come into well- 
nigh universal use. 



CHAPTER XIX 

EARLY COLONIAL MANUFACTURES 

AS the colonies in America had been planted from 
England, not for the benefit of the colonists but at 
first for the enrichment of companies in England, 
and later for the general English benefit, the laws of Eng- 
land from the first, tended to discourage all manufacturing 
in America. It was intended that the colonists should 
till the soil, produce whatever they could of value in that 
way, send it to England, and buy in return such articles 
of use as were made by English manufacturers. If the 
colonists were to be permitted to make things for them- 
selves, of course the American market for English 
manufactures must be impaired. 

That was the argument. But the colonists were, 
almost from the first, a people disposed to consider their 
own interests as superior to any British enactment that 
might interfere with them, and so, early in the seven- 
teenth century the people in Massachusetts and New 
Jersey and other colonies began to make iron of an inferior 
quality, out of such ores as they had, and a little later 
they very naturally began to work this iron into such 

187 



188 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



things as they needed — pots, pans, kettles, skillets, and- 
irons, and the like. 

At that time, even in England, there was no machin- 
ery for making nails, and of course in the building of 
wooden houses in the colonies nails were a constant 
necessity. Accordingly the colonists set to work to 
make nails for themselves, forging them by hand and 
hammering them out on an anvil. There were no nail 
factories set up, but in many families, men, women, 
boys and girls, devoted their leisure hours to such work. 

Nails were so scarce 
and so valuable at 
that time that in 
Pennsylvania and 
some other colonies 
it became the custom 
to burn all abandoned 
buildings in order to 
collect and use again 
the nails that had been employed in their construction. 
In the period, from 1640 to 1660, when the migration 
to New England fell off and the farmers in that region, 
by reason of a lack of markets for their products, found 
themselves without means to buy English made goods, 
they took to the making of cloth for themseh^es. They 
had sheep that yielded wool. They had flax, and they 
had hemp, and they knew how to handle those things. 
In Virginia they raised silk worms and made silk. 




A chafing dish, (New York State Cabi- 
net of Natural History.) 



EARLY COLONIAL MANUFACTURES 189 

They had even a little cotton, which was brought from 
the Barbadoes, for the cultivation of cotton in the south- 
ern colonies had not yet become an industry of any im- 
portance, because of the difficulty of separating the cotton 
from its seed. They had spinning wheels in every house, 
and they had looms which they skillfully knew how to 
use. They knew how to spin and how to weave, and 
they set to work to supply themselves with clothing by 
their own exertions. 

Until nearly the end of the seventeenth century the 
inattentive English government did not seriously inter- 
fere with such industries as these, but about that time 
the Enghsh manufacturers began to see that if such 
work should be allowed to go on in America their own 
market must be injured, and so a demand was made that 
authority should stop all colonial manufacturing. 

The effort was not successful. The colonists were 
three thousand miles away from English supervision, 
and so they went on making clothes for themselves with 
a jaunty indifference to any paper prohibition that might 
be sent from the other side. A little later than this, 
one town in Connecticut paid all its public expenses by 
maintaining a flock of two thousand sheep upon its com- 
mon lands, and selling the wool to its people, who freely 
converted it into cloth and clothing, quite regardless of 
English laws forbidding such manufacture. 

In short, it proved to be impossible for any British 
law to prevent the men who had settled in America from 



190 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



doing the best they could for themselves. They were 
brave, free men. They had come out to America at 
risk of their lives and their fortunes. They had pos- 
sessed themselves of the country at cost of enormous 
toil, suffering, hardship and danger. They had fought 
against Indians and French, for the right to live their 
own lives in their own way. No " bull against a comet " 
could ever have been more utterly futile than a law 




Silk winding. (Facsimile of a picture in Edward Williams's " Virginia 
truly valued," 1650.) 

passed in England to prevent such men as these from 
utilizing the opportunities that presented themselves in 
the country they had conquered, or from making for 
themselves such articles of use as they could fabricate 
more cheaply than they could buy them from the Eng- 



EARLY COLONIAL MANUFACTURES 191 

lish manufacturers. They even made laws of their own 
to encourage colonial manufacturing. Massachusetts 
in 1656 and Virginia in 1662 made statutes directly 
designed to encourage textile manufactures, and other 
colonies followed this example. 

Among other forbidden things that the colonists be- 
gan early to do was to tan leather for their own use from 
the hides of the cattle they killed. Under EngHsh law 
these hides should have been sent to England and there 
tanned and manufactured into shoes and other things, 
and sent back for sale to the colonists who, in this way, 
would have paid tribute to the English manufacturer. 
But there were men among the colonists who knew how 
to convert hides into leather and they were men of too 
sturdy a common sense to see the necessity of sending 
their hides across three thousand miles of ocean, when 
they could tan and manufacture them for themselves. 

A printing press was established at Cambridge in Mas- 
sachusetts as early as 1639, but until after the end of the 
seventeenth century printing was very slightly developed 
in this country. 

The first paper mill was established near German- 
town, Pennsylvania, near the end of the century. Thus, 
little by little, and acting upon conditions as they found 
them, the colonists made such beginnings of manufact- 
ure as were necessary to answer their needs. 



CHAPTER XX 

EDUCATION, RELIGION AND MARRIAGES 

THERE was very little of education in any of the 
colonies during the seventeenth century. The 
colonists were too busy indeed to attend to the 
schooling of their children, and in such communities as 
they had established, education seemed to many men to 
be rather a superfluity than a necessity. Many of the 
boys were not taught at all. Those who were taught 
learned only reading, writing and the rudiments of arith- 
metic. For girls it was deemed suflficient if they could 
write their names and do needlework. But the needle- 
work was of a superior quality and specimens of it are 
cherished even unto this day in museums and private 
houses, as illustrative of the dexterity, the skill and the 
patience of colonial dames and damsels. 

At the beginning, of course, there were no newspapers 
in the country and no books except such as a few clergy- 
men and other educated colonists had brought with them 
from England. Therefore the lack of a general capacity 
to read was of less consequence than it would have been 
in a community supplied with literature. 

But the impulse toward education and reading was 
192 



EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 19^ 

early developed in the colonies. The printing press es- 
tablished at Cambridge in 1639, was followed by the set- 
ting up of others in different parts of the country, par- 
ticularly in Boston and Philadelphia. They printed 
mainly pamphlets and a little later they began to publish 
newspapers. But that was not until the next century. 

In the early days of the seventeenth century there were 
no free schools anywhere and the pay schools that existed 
were few, ill equipped, badly taught, and generally inefh- 
cient. The earliest movement that was made in any of 
the colonies which looked to a broader and more general 
system of popular education was made in Massachusetts, 
where in 1647 ^ ^^.w was enacted that every town 
which had fifty householders in it should maintain a 
school for teaching the English branches. For a consid- 
erable time after that this law was very imperfectly en- 
forced but little by little schools multipHed. It was at a 
very much later date that the free school system was 
established in this country. 

To the more cultivated men of that time the general 
education of the people seemed a far less important ob- 
ject than the higher education of a few men destined to 
become clergymen, and, as such, instructors and leaders 
of the people. So long before anything like a common 
school system was established, either in Massachusetts, 
or in any other of the colonies. Harvard College was set 
up at Cambridge in 1636. It was the purpose of that 
college chiefly to educate men for the ministry. Near 
M 



194 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

the end of the seventeenth century another college was 
established, this time in Virginia, and called William and 
Mary. The underlying purpose in the setting up of that 
institution was the hope of educating and civilizing the 
Indians. 

The very earliest colonists brought with them to 
America a spirit of religious intolerance. Those of 
Massachusetts and many others removed to America, as 
we know, in order to escape such intolerance in England, 
and so, also, did the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Catho- 
lics of Maryland, the Huguenots of New York and South 
Carolina, and many others. Yet it seems never to have 
occurred to some of them at least, that having thus es- 
caped from persecution for conscience's sake, it might 
be wrong for them to practice a similar persecution in 
their turn in an effort to regulate the religious beliefs of 
men and women who differed with them in opinion. It 
will not do, however, to judge men of that time by the 
standards which we accept to-day. It would be grossly 
wrong to hold them responsible for their intolerance in 
the same measure in which we should hold intolerant 
men or states responsible in our time. But the fact of 
their intolerance was one which played a considerable 
part in the history of the colonies and it must be con- 
sidered ill connection with other facts of their lives. 

At first in Virginia no form of worship was allowed 
except that of the Church of England. A little later the 
incoming of Puritans, Baptists, and others led, among that 



EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 195 

easy-going people, to a larger tolerance in practice if not 
in law. In Massachusetts, as we have already seen, the 
Puritan religion was insisted upon with a rigor which drove 
out the Baptists, Quakers and others who differed in 
opinion with the majority, including among those ban- 
ished no less personages than Roger Williams and Anne 
Hutchinson. This, as we know, led to the establishment 
of the Rhode Island colony, absolutely the only one in 
which perfect religious liberty existed even up to the 
time of the Revolution. For while Maryland prided it- 
self upon its tolerance, it restricted that tolerance rigidly 
to those who accepted Christianity. In Pennsylvania 
full liberty of belief and worship was granted, and the 
right to vote was not restricted by any religious test. 
But even in Pennsylvania no man was allowed to hold 
office unless he believed in the godhood of Jesus. The 
Puritan colonies of New England were in effect hier- 
archies, in which the church was the ruling power and the 
parson was paramount. The authority of the church was 
intermeddlingly active in every relation of life. It as- 
serted itself in every man's home. It regulated conduct 
everywhere. It controlled all the affairs of life from 
the cradle to the grave. 

Everybody, old and young, must go to church, and in 
church everybody must patiently endure. The meeting- 
houses were not warmed, even in zero weather, and the 
sermons and prayers and psalm singing endured often 
for three hours or more. Yet every babe on the first 



196 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

Sunday after its birth — even though it were born on a 
Saturday night — must be taken to church to be bap- 
tized. It must be kept in the cold there for all the 
hours that the precentor and the parson might see fit to 
occupy, and then, in some cases at least, it must be 
immersed in the water of a font from which the icy 
surface had just been broken away. 

It has been suggested that a great many New England 
babies were thus prematurely baptized into heaven — in 
other words, that the infant mortality of that time, which 
was well-nigh frightful, may have been due in consider- 
able part to the church exaction of prompt baptism un- 
der unfavorable conditions. There were other causes of 
infant mortality however, in the imperfect heating of 
houses, in the unwise drugging that prevailed, in the 
lack of drainage and proper ventilation, and in other con- 
ditions of life in the New England of that time. 

And there was compensation for the excessive infant 
mortality in the equally excessive birth rate. The men 
of Puritan New England were accustomed to marry early 
and often. Bridegrooms at the time of their first mar- 
riages were usually under twenty years of age, and if 
they were widowed they were never long, as the old 
records show, in taking new partners to themselves. 
Twelve or fifteen children constituted an ordinary 
family. Fifteen or twenty children were not unusual. 
Families of from twenty to twenty-five children were 
so frequent as not to excite any wondering remark, and 



EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 197 

there are records showing even thirty or more children 
as the sheaf of a single father and mother. In New 




A wedding in New Amsterdam. 

York families were scarcely so large as in New England, 
but men and women in that colony married early, and 
family life was honored as the only fit condition. 



198 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

The psalm singing of that time was a very dismal and 
soul-wearying performance. We know because both the 
words and the "music" survive to us in trustworthy rec- 
ords. The sermonizing was even dryer and drearier. 
We know for the reason that all the printing presses of 
New England were chiefly employed, for a hundred years 
and more, in printing sermons, and hundreds of those 
discourses survive on the remoter shelves of our great 
libraries. They dealt almost entirely with matters of 
theological doctrine, scarcely at all with matters of right 
living. The parsons and the magistrates regulated con- 
duct much more directly than by sermonizing. They 
had the law for their weapon in such matters. 

It is easy to suppose that the sturdy, healthy New 
England boys and girls were the greatest sufferers from 
the religious intolerance and the all-embracing religious 
interference of the time. Their sports and pastimes were 
relentlessly kept within narrow bounds by an authority 
that had no hesitation in invading the home itself and 
prescribing rules for every act of life— rules chiefly de- 
signed to prohibit the indulgence of natural instincts and 
to forbid enjoyment. The Puritan boys and girls must 
all go to church, where they were herded together under 
the eyes of the stern tithing man, and compelled, not only 
to sit out the two or three hour long sermons, but to 
keep awake under all that soporific infliction. 

Worse still their young souls were tortured almost 
from infancy by concern for salvation and fear of damna- 



EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 199 




John Eliot. (By permission from a portrait in the possession of the 
family of the late William Whiting, Esq.) 



200 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

tion. Unhappily for them, they beheved in the gloomy 
Calvinistic doctrines preached to them from the pulpit 
and taught to them in their homes. Their minds were 
constantly directed to the fact that they were in immi- 
nent danger of dying and going to hell. They were 
taught that some are born to be saved and some are born 
to be dammed, both by eternal decrees, made ''before 
ever the foundations of the world were laid," and that 
the number of those born to the one fate or the other 
" is so fixed and limited that it can neither be added to 
nor taken from." 

Old records and diaries show us that even in tender 
infancy, little children of three or four years of age were 
taught these doctrines in ways that might well have 
driven them into convulsions or made raving maniacs of 
them. Judge Sewell, whose diary is perhaps the best 
mirror of that time, tells us how he used to " labor " 
with his little four year old child, praying with her, read- 
ing sermons and psalms to her, and the like, until the 
little girl lost all interest in everything except the problem- 
atical saving of her poor, innocent soul, which, she feared, 
a jealous God might have foreordained to eternal dam- 
nation for no fault of her own but because of the diso- 
bedience of Adam and Eve. 

Let us not judge these people too harshly. Let us 
not measure their conduct or their attitude of mind by 
the standards of a more enlightened age. We must bear 
in mind that they sincerely believed in these doctrines, 



EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 201 

so sincerely indeed that no question of their truth ever 
entered their minds. They were sure that these were 
the direct and unquestionable teachings of God himself, 
which it would have been blasphemy even to doubt. 
They regarded this life as nothing more than a prepara- 
tory school for the life that is to come. Therefore they 
cared nothing for any consideration of happiness or com- 
fort in this life if the future life and the soul's welfare 
were involved. They loved their children, and they be- 
lieved those children to be in imminent danger of hell. 
They thought it no harm, but altogether a duty, there- 
fore, to subject their little ones to these afflictions of the 
spirit by way of saving their souls. 

Marriage in the Puritan colonies was a very practical 
affair, with an eye to the main chance always. There 
was sentiment underlying courtship, without doubt, but 
very little of that sentiment appears in such records as 
we have of the times. It was the custom when a man 
of means proposed marriage to a woman of means, par- 
ticularly if she happened to be a widow possessed of 
property left to her by her first husband, for the suitor 
to dicker with his inamorata as to how much money or 
property she should leave to him by will, in the event of 
her dying before he did. And the ladies in the case were 
equally exigent, though, as the records show, they usually 
got the worse of the bargain. 

At first, and for long afterwards, the ministers took 
no part in the solemnization of marriages. This was 



202 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

because of their sleepless abhorrence of " popish " prac- 
tices. They feared to perform marriage services in re- 
ligious ways, lest they should be thought to sanction the 
Catholic doctrine that marriage is a sacrament. 

Widows marrying again, often wore no clothes except 
their shifts at the ceremony. This was to signify that 
they brought no property to their new husbands, who 
were thus exempted from all obligation to pay any debts 
their brides might have inherited from their first spouses. 

In New York there was a like attention to the ^' tem- 
poralities " in marriage, but as the Dutch vrauws of that 
region were as alert and intelligent traders as their hus- 
bands were, there was far less inequality in the bargain- 
ing. In Virginia, Maryland and the southern colonies, 
sentiment seems to have played a larger part in matri- 
monial alliances. The widow was usually left in posses- 
sion of everything, as the custodian of the children, and 
in the making of marriages this seems to have been as- 
sumed as a matter of course. 

As we have seen, there was more or less of religious 
intolerance in all the colonies, except Rhode Island, but 
nowhere was it so painfully manifest as in the Puritan 
colonies of New England. Virginia did indeed decree 
the banishment of dissenters from the established reli- 
gion, but the decree was never very rigorously enforced. 
In none of the other colonies did religion so dominate 
the minds of men or so control their social relations as 
it did in the Puritan commonwealths. 



EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 203 

In New York the Dutch Reformed church was dom- 
inant, and its doctrines were Calvinistic, but its domi- 
nance was at no time complete — either during the Dutch 
days or afterwards, when the Enghsh were in control. 
New York had the early advantage of being a commercial 
company's trading post rather than the seat of a propa- 
gandist colony. 



CHAPTER XXI 

LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 

UP to the end of the seventeenth century, Hfe and 
manners in all the colonies were exceedingly 
simple. 

Even the families of those who were best to do lived 
in a fashion far ruder and simpler than that which pre- 
vails in our time in the remotest farming districts. They 
had horses and cattle now with many a flock of sheep, 
but as they had no roads much better than woodland 
trails, the settlements still clung closely to the coasts 
and the water courses which furnished convenient high- 
ways. 

Because of the lack of land highways, and especially 
of bridges across streams, there were scarcely any vehi- 
cles of any kind in use in the colonies until nearly the 
end of that century. When a few light carriages did at 
last come into use they had to be taken to pieces every 
time a stream was to be crossed. The separate parts 
were then packed into the rowboats that carried the 
passengers, while the horses swam at the side or behind 
the boats. 
204 



LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 205 

The 'problem of the colonists still was to produce 
grain enough and meat enough to live upon, and so 
farming was the chief industry of all the colonies, except 
that in New England fishing, shipbuilding and commerce 
over sea supplemented it. The farming implements of 
that time were of the very rudest character, and most 
of them were imported at high cost from Europe. 

The firearms of the colonists were rude and clumsy. 
They were such as we should now deem unfit for use, 
either in attack or defence. Most of the guns in use 
were matchlocks. That is to say, they were guns which 
could be shot off only by touching a coal of fire to the 
powder in what was called the pan of the gun. Such a 
gun could be fired only once in a minute or two and not 
that often if the soldier's fuse happened to burn out. 
For in that case he must run to the nearest fire and re- 
light it before he could again discharge his matchlock. 
Moreover the gun itself, instead of being brought to the 
shoulder as guns are nowadays, was rested in some 
crotched sticks, and was fired with far greater slowness 
and difficulty than even large cannon are to-day. 

After a while a new kind of gun came into use which 
was distinctly superior to the matchlock. This was a 
gun in which there was a spring lock armed with a flint 
so placed that when the trigger was pulled the flint 
scraped down over a piece of roughened steel, created a 
shower of sparks, and ignited the powder in the gun. 
These flintlock guns continued in use until well into the 



206 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 




Armor worn by the Pilgrims in 1620. 



LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 207 

nineteenth century. The American Revokition and the 
war of 1 812 were fought with flintlocks. 

But even such weapons as these were costly and very 
scarce among the colonists. A good deal of their fight- 
ing was therefore done with pikes and half-pikes, two 
forms of spear that were effective only at close quarters. 
Such weapons were the less effective in fighting Indians 
for the reason that the Indians rarely allowed themselves 
to be brought into close quarters. Even in our own day 
it is the habit of the Indians to fight from a distance, to 
retreat firing when pressed and never for one moment to 
come into hand to hand conflict if it is possible to avoid it. 

Of course the advantage of the colonists in having 
firearms while the Indians had only bows, arrows, spears, 
tomahawks and battle-axes, was soon lost to them. 
Laws were made forbidding the sale of firearms to the 
Indians, but everwhere in the world the greed of gain 
has always overridden the most wholesome and neces- 
sary laws, wherever profit might result from their viola- 
tion. Even in a time when the very life of the colonists 
hung in the balance of Indian warfare, there were base 
traders who gladly made money by selling to the In- 
dians the weapons they needed for the slaughter of the 
whites — men, women and children. 

Among the Indians it was the custom to regard the 
tribe rather than the individual as the unit of society. 
If any man of one tribe injured any man of any other 
tribe the injured man's tribe felt that it had a right to 



208 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

hold that other tribe responsible for the wrong. The 
Indians applied this rule in their dealings with white 
men. If a white man cheated an Indian, or killed an 
Indian, or wronged him in any way, the Indian idea was 
not to hunt out the offender and punish him or ask the 
white man to hunt him out and punish him, but to make 
the wrong a cause for war between the tribe to which 
the injured Indian belonged and all the white men in 
the region roundabout. It is this pecuHarity of the 
Indian point of view which chiefly accounts for the fre- 
quency of Indian wars in those earlier times and for 
their merciless savagery. 

Under such conditions it was necessary for the Eng- 
lishmen in America to stand always upon their defence. 
They carried their guns with them always and they forti- 
fied fheir settlements with palisades and in other ways. 
Among these other methods of defence was the building 
of what were called blockhouses. These were made of 
hewn logs laid closely together and built up in such 
fashion that the upper story projected beyond the plumb 
line of the lower by a foot or two. This prevented scal- 
ing by those who might assault the blockhouse. In 
times of trouble all the settlers gathered in these 
blockhouses and used them as fortifications from which 
to fight off the Indian attacks by firing from slits in 
the walls. If the Indians had been determined war 
makers of course no blockhouse could long have stood 
their assault. They might have forced their way up to 



LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 209 



it, and built fires around its base, thus driving its oc- 
cupants out of it into the open where they might be 
slaughtered without difficulty. But at no time in Ameri- 
can history have the Indians shown themselves to be de- 
termined fighters. Their method of warfare has always 
been to make a dash. If the dash were successful they 
slaughtered their victims ; if it were unsuccessful they re- 
tired and gave up the fight. The colonists early learned 
this by experience, and they ^^. 

arranged their defensive 
works in full recognition of 
the Indian habit of mind. 
One other gr^at difficulty 
that the early colonists en- 
countered was their total 
lack of knowledge concern- 
'ing the cHmate and soil of 
the regions in which they 
had settled. After they had 
quit hunting for gold and for 
a northwest passage through the continent, they at last set 
themselves to farming. They did so however with a de- 
gree of ignorance which in many cases proved disastrous. 
They did not know what crops could be successfully cul- 
tivated in this country and so they tried practically 
everything of which they had ever heard — but chiefly 
such crops as grow only in warm climates. In New Eng- 
land they could grow corn, potatoes, turnips, pumpkins, 

N 




Ancient handmade spade. 
(State Agricultural Museum, Al- 
bany, N. Y.) 



210 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

squashes, beans, peas, and the hke, but instead of that 
they tried the cultivation of silk, wine, madder, olives, 
tea, coffee, ■ cacao — the bean from which chocolate and 
cocoa arc prepared — and many, other things that can be 
grown only in tropical or low subtropical regions. 

These attempts of course resulted in failures and 
sometimes even in the impoverishment of those who 
made them. It was only little by little that such mis- 
takes w^ere corrected and that the colonists learned what 
crops they could grow with profit upon such lands and 
in such climates as they had. 

Little by little at the same time they learned how to 
live in their new surroundings. The New Englanders 
learned the use of sleds in winter and of snowshoes. 
Both they and the Virginians learnc: .ow to make the 
abundant game and fish a profitable food supply. 

In the meanwdiile all the colonists learned much that 
aided them to live comfortably in the regions in which 
they had settled. One important thing that they had 
learned by the middle of the century was how to build 
houses somewhat though not very well suited to the 
conditions in which they were living. At first they had 
put up bush shelters or dug holes in the ground. A 
little later they had built bark wigwams which did not 
and could not keep out the cold of winter. A little 
later still they learned how to build log cabins which 
they could chink and daub wdth mud so as to make them 
fairly comfortable habitations. 



LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 211 

There were few sawmills in America in those days. 
Boards and planks were therefore exceedingly scarce 
and costly. Yet with growing prosperity the colonists 




Sawmill. (Facsimile, from " Virginia truly valued," by Edward 
Williams, 1650.) 

desired something better than logs with which to build 
their houses. They had acquired expertness in hewing 
out planks with a broadax and still more in riving out 
shingles and clapboards with a frow. Many of their 
houses, therefore, were built of these rough hewn planks 



212 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

and still more of them — some of which are standing even 
unto this day — were covered with shingles. 

About the middle of the century they began to saw 
out boards and planks with what were known as whip- 
saws. In order to do this they placed a log upon two 
high trestles and with one man standing on top and one 
below they sawed out such lumber as they needed. It 
was a slow and costly method of manufacture but it was 
the best and cheapest then known. 

There was no such thing as a stove in existence at 
that time, and of course there was no such thing as a 
furnace or a steam radiator with which to warm houses. 
The use of coal as fuel had not yet begun. The only 
means of domestic heating, and even of cooking, was the 
great cavernous fireplace into which large backlogs were 
rolled and fires built upon and in front of them. These 
fireplaces were often so large as to admit of settles being 
placed within them at the sides of the fire for the sake 
of greater warmth and comfort. In each of them there 
was hung a crane. This was a bar, sometimes of green 
wood and sometimes of iron, hung upon hinges, which 
could be swung outward and inward at pleasure. Pots 
and kettles were hung upon it over the fire by hooks of 
varying lengths, while skillets, ovens, and the like were 
set upon the vast hearth where live coals were shoveled 
under them and upon their lids for purposes of baking. 
Frying pans were used simply by setting them upon hot 
coals in front of the fire. Coffee pots and the like were 



LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 213 

set upon little three-legged iron rings called trivets, 
under which coals were placed. 

In some houses the fireplaces were built without jambs. 
There was simply a wall with a broad hearth in front, 
over which was a hood, leading to the chimney above. 
Fire was built upon the hearth and settles surrounded it. 

The fire was a fierce one, for wood was plentiful, but 
it did not warm the room except for a few feet in front 
of it. There were two reasons for this : First of all, the 
houses were so ill built as to let the wintry blasts into 
them freely ; in the second place, the chimneys them- 
selves had upward openings so vast that the cold air came 
down them as fast as the hot air rose. As a consequence 
of these conditions water froze even near the fire, and 
we have records showing that distinguished New England 
divines sometimes had to suspend the writing of their 
sermons because the ink froze in their pens, even when 
they sat within the fireplace. 

As another consequence, all the beds of that time 
were closely and unwholesomely curtained to keep out 
draughts, as was the case in England also, and every bed 
was warmed before use by passing a warming-pan filled 
with hot coals between the sheets. This necessity en- 
dured in England till the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, as we learn from Dickens' account of the trial of Bar- 
dell V. Pickwick. 

Roasting was done in two ways. Sometimes the fowl 
or the pig or the cut of meat to be roasted was thrust 



214 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

through with an iron rod, called a spit, so arranged that 
it could be turned by a crank. A reflector was placed 
behind it on the side opposite the fire so as to keep all 
of the heat within. 

Another, a simpler and a more generally employed 
way of roasting, was by hanging the meats to strings 
which depended from the ceiling. Under each roast a 
dripping pan was placed, and it was usually the task of 
the boys and girls of the household to twist the strings 
so that the roasts should continually revolve. The boys 
and girls were also required to baste the meats as they 
cooked, with the juices that fell from them into the drip- 
ping pans. 

Many houses of that time in New England consisted 
only of a kitchen, which served also as a living room, with 
some sleeping rooms above it, and in practically all the 
houses the large kitchen was the family room for all 
purposes. In Virginia the kitchen was always in a de- 
tached building and was occupied by negro servants. 

Lack of spaciousness in the rude dwellings of that 
time led to the invention of devices for making the most 
of such room as was available. The beds for grown 
people were raised on long legs, high above the floor, 
and under each there was a little trundle bed, on wheels, 
which could be drawn out at night for the use of the 
children. There were also beds that folded up against 
the wall when not in use. 

For light, the best of all appliances in use at that time 



LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 215 



was the ordinary tallow candle of domestic manufacture. 
In Virginia and the region south of that, torches were 
often used, made of fat pine sticks which were set up in 
iron frames or sconces. 

In New Amsterdam, later New York, many of the 
chimneys were built of 
sticks and mud, and the 
result was that many 
fires occurred, until at 
last this source of dan- 
ger was removed by an 
ordinance forbidding 
the use of wood in the 
construction of chim- 
neys. 

Another precaution 
against fire in the towns 
was the employment of 
chimney sweeps ; with- 
out their services, which 
were compelled by law 
in New York, there was 
always danger of a con- 
flagration resulting from the ignition of the soot in chim- 
neys. In New England and Virginia this danger was 
often averted by another and simpler device. When the 
roofs were deeply covered with snow, or when a drench- 
ing rain was falling, great sheaves of straw were thrust 




Wrought iron lamp and sadiron. 
(New York State Cabinet of Natural 
History, Albany.) 



216 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

up the chimney and set on fire. Thus the accumulated 
soot in the flues was safely burned away. But in New 
York and in Charleston, South Carolina, chimneys were 
swept at regular intervals by those who made a business 
of the matter. In Charleston, even up to the time of the 
civil war of 1 861-1865, the little negro chimney sweep, 
with his brooms and bags, was seen and his musical cry 
was heard in all the streets. 

As there were no such things as friction matches in 
those days, or for two centuries later, the keeping of 
" seed fire," by covering the coals with ashes was an 
important concern, and when by any accident the seed 
fire was lost, colonial boys were sent to the nearest 
neighbor's house — often many miles distant — to borrow 
a brand with which to rekindle the hearth. 

There were very few blankets, such as we now use, in 
those days. Quilts, stuffed with moss, tow, wool or 
whatever else might be available, were generally used 
instead. Everybody slept upon feather beds, and the 
Dutch in New Netherland also used lighter feather beds 
for a covering, precisely as many French and German 
people do to this day. 

In all the colonies there was a certain kindly neighbor- 
liness which in many ways ameliorated and improved the 
conditions of life. If there was illness in any house the 
neighbors volunteered to sit up with the ill person. If 
there was a death, the neighbors came in, not only to 
" sit up with the corpse," but to provide a cofiin and to 



LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 217 

take off the shoulders of the stricken family the work of 
arranging for the funeral. Kindly women went into the 
house and took charge of all the housekeeping affairs. 
Kindly men looked after the cattle and horses and did 
the woodchopping and whatever else there was to be 
done. 

In other and less distressing affairs of life, a like 
spirit of neighborly kindliness lent cheer to existence. 
If a man was building a house or a barn, he got the 
timbers ready, and then his neighbors came to help him 
in the " raising " of the framework. If he had cut the 
timber from a piece of ground that he wished to culti- 
vate, his neighbors all came to help him burn the brush 
and the logs. 

If a woman had painfully sewed scraps of cloth to- 
gether to make a quilt all the women of the neighborhood 
came joyously to her to help in the " quilting." When 
the farmer had gathered in his corn, he gave a " husk- 
ing bee," and all his neighbors worked by torchlight at 
the corn pile until the last ear was husked. 

All these neighborly co-operations were made the oc- 
casions of social frolics. When night came after the 
women had finished the quilting, the beaus came also. 
There was a supper and a dance. Kissing games were 
played and the jollity was unembarrassed by any foolish 
conventionality. 

When the time of the corn husking came, the women 
as well as the men took part and whenever a red ear 



218 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

was found the finder — woman or man — was entitled to a 
kiss from the nearest one of the opposite sex. The 
com pile was carefully divided into two equal parts. 
There was a " choosing up" between two chiefs so that 
the number of buskers on the two sides should be 
equal. Then there was a race to see which side should 
first finish the husking of its share of the corn. The 
struggle was often exciting and always interesting. After 
it was over, there was a supper, and after that a dance. 
There were apt to be plentiful potations of hard cider 
or something stronger as an accompaniment to these 
frolics. 

In these and a score of other ways, there was neigh- 
borly co-operation, which at once eased the work of the 
colonists and gave to them the advantage of an enjoyable 
social intercourse. 



CHAPTER XXII 

WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY THE SERVANT QUESTION 

SOME FEATURES OF DOMESTIC LIFE 

THE purchase, early in the century, of a few kid- 
napped negro slaves, from a Dutch skipper, by the 
colonists at Jamestown was in fact the beginning 
of negro slavery in America. But it was a beginning 
which did not lead to much until nearly a century later. 
Now and then a negro slave was brought into the colo- 
nies and sold. At that time there was nowhere a 
thought that it could be wrong for white men to enslave 
negroes from Africa. In the first place these negroes 
were heathen men and pagans. In the second place they 
differed so radically from white men in their color, and 
otherwise, that nobody in that day regarded them as 
human beings akin to our own race. But no consider- 
able demand arose in any of the colonies for negro slaves 
during a long time after that first purchase of Africans. 
And so the number of such slaves increased very slowly. 
Negro slavery played a very small part indeed in colonial 
life during the greater part of that first period of ninety 
years. 

There was another sort of slavery, however, which 

219 



220 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

brought great numbers of men to the colonies and for 
the better part of a century these men were relied upon 
to do, as bond servants, the rougher duties of life. 

These white slaves were of several classes. The best 
of them were those who had sold themselves into slavery 
for a limited term of years by way of escaping from im- 
prisonment for debt in England. In England at that 
time it was the inhuman practice to condemn men who 
owed money that they could not pay, to loathsome pris- 
ons, thus robbing them of all opportunity to pay off their 
debts by industry or to earn a living for themselves. In 
order to escape from this inhumanity many of these poor 
debtors agreed with their creditors to come out to America 
as bondsmen for a term of years, the creditors to receive 
whatever compensation they could get from the sale of their 
debtors as servants. At the end of their term of service 
these men became free again in a new country where, if 
they were energetic, they could begin life anew with at least 
the hope of earning a living. Each of them, when released 
at the end of his term of servitude, was permitted to take 
with him one hoe, one ax, and one suit of clothes. 

The same rules applied to another class of white bond 
servants who came out in considerable numbers at that 
time. These were men who, finding themselves abjectly 
poor in England, and hopeless of bettering themselves 
there, voluntarily went out to America under contract 
with shipmasters and other speculators, to serve as bonds- 
men for a given number of years, after which they should 



WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY 221 

be free. They were sold for their terms of service by 
those who had paid their passage to America. Some of 
them, being men of education and capacity, ultimately 
rose to positions of prominence in America, while a good 
many of them, without rising into prominence, managed 
to establish themselves in comfort in the new land and 
to build up moderate fortunes for their famiHes after 
them. 

But like all other traffic in human beings this one was 
attended by much of wrong and cruelty. The English 
authorities rid themselves of the care of many of their 
paupers and criminals by forcibly sending them out and 
selling them as bond servants in the colonies. Many in- 
dentured servants in England were in like manner shipped 
to the colonies by their masters and sold for the period 
of their apprenticeship, which usually ran from four to ten 
years. Orphaned children, left without means of support, 
and therefore liable to become a charge upon their 
parishes in England, were sent away and sold in like 
manner. 

Worst of all, this traffic in white slaves became profit- 
able and gangs of unscrupulous men were organized in 
England who deliberately kidnapped men and boys and 
sold them into this species of slavery. Sometimes they 
got their victims drunk and removed them, while in that 
state, to the deck of a ship. When the victims came to 
their senses they were far out at sea and were informed 
that they had signed an agreement to be sold as bond 



222 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

servants in America. Sometimes men were seized by 
simple violence, without the preliminary formality of 
making them drunk, and carried by force into slavery. 

llie system was a cruel one and one founded upon the 
greatest wrong. Nevertheless in very many cases it 
served to benefit its victims, precisely as negro slavery 
has incidentally educated savage Africans into civilized 
citizens of a great free nation. In neither case can the 
result be said to justify the means, but history can deal 
only with the facts. 

The colonists in the first century thus had four kinds 
of servants — negro slaves, white slaves, captured Indians 
and hired heljD. Yet the " servant question," especially 
in New England, was as vexed and as vexatious then as 
it ever has been since. In the letters and other rec- 
ords that remain to us from that early time, we find the 
woes of housekeepers recorded in even bitterer words 
than those that mark the feminine conversations of our 
time. 

Mrs. Alice Morse Earle quotes from a letter written 
by the Reverend Ezekiel Rogers in 1659 ^s follows : 

" Much ado have I with ni}^ own family, hard to get a 
servant glad of catechising or family duties. . . . 
The young brood doth much afflict me." 

Many letters remain to us in which the heads of the 
best households in New England complain that they are 
reduced as to servants to one wild Indian girl who knocks 
the babies over the head and must be " beaten to a pur- 



WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY 223 

pose," in order to secure better behavior. Many letters 
were written beseeching friends to buy servants for the 
writer from newly arrived cargoes of white slaves. 

The matter grew even worse after the seventeenth 
century ended, but it was so bad in the seventeenth cen- 
tury as to make a distinct and lasting impression upon 




A colonial flaxwheel. 

colonial life in New England. Finding it impossible 
to secure servants, the New Englanders — men, women 
and children alike — were forced to do everything for 
themselves, and practice made them perfect, the men in 
all sorts of outdoor work, and the women in every art 
of the cook, the housekeeper and the nurse. 

And to the work of the women in cooking and house- 



224 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

keeping, there was another burden added which is quite 
unknown in our day, even among the less well to do. 
The women of every family must make with their own 
hands all the clothing worn by men and women folk 
alike — outer and under garments, coats and gowns, shirts, 
drawers and everything else. They must knit all the 
stockings and socks needed by the family, and they must 
color all of them in domestic dye pots. In most cases 
they must first make the cloths used in cutting out cloth- 
ing, washing and carding the wool, rotting and hackling 
the flax, spinning the one into yarn and the other into 
thread, weaving and dyeing the cloth, and even manu- 
facturing the thread with which to sew garments to- 
gether by hand, for the sewing machine was not dreamed 
of until two centuries later. 

Surely no women ever needed competent servants 
more than did these good colonial dames, and no women 
ever had less of such service at command. 

There was good to come out of even such conditions. 
Not only was skilled and tireless industry bred in all 
New England homes, leaving no time for languishing and 
morbid introspection, but a spirit of mutual helpfulness 
was born which undoubtedly did much for the develop- 
ment of sturdy character among the men and women 
of the time. Each family felt itself to be a unit. In 
each every member contributed what he could of service 
in aid of the general welfare. It was not thought at all 
unbecoming for the boys to help the girls with the fam- 



WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY 225 

ily washing, the milking, the butter making, the sweep- 
ing and scrubbing, or even with the cooking. And the 
girls in their turn thought nothing of going into the 
fields to help in hoeing corn or planting or digging pota- 
toes, when the crops needed their services. A spirit of 
mutual helpfulness was bred by these conditions which 
has contributed far more than we can easily realize to 
the subsequent prosperity of this country of ours and to 
the character of its people. 

Much of the work was done in the spirit of frolic. 
When the time came for drying apples or making apple 
butter, or pressing cider, or killing hogs and converting 
them into a year's supply of meat, every member of the 
family old enough to walk took part in what all regarded 
as a jollification. The boys thought it ** great fun " to 
hitch a horse to a sled, go into the teeming orchards, 
load their sled with apples and haul them to the cider 
press or to the house, accordingly as they were to be 
pressed into cider or dried for winter use. When 
evening came the whole family gathered before the 
" great bearded fire " in the vast kitchen, and all set to 
work to " peel, quarter and core " multitudinous apples 
for the morrow's drying or for the apple butter kettles. 

Corn cutting and shocking, and later the husking of 
corn in the field shocks, were done in a like joyous spirit 
of frolic at work. 

Hog killing time was a festival. Beginning before 
dayhght, great fires were kindled into which stones were 
o 



226 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

thrown — this especially in Virginia where the number 
of hogs grown on every plantation was great. When 
the stones were at white heat, they were lifted out of 
the fire with tongs and plunged into hogsheads of water, 




Primitive mode of grinding corn. 

half buried slantwise, in the ground. When the water 
boiled and bubbled, the freshly slaughtered hogs were 
plunged into it and the men in charge scraped off the 
hair and bristles and dressed the carcasses ready to be 
cut up and cured. They also cut off the tails and gave 
them to the children, who roasted them in the bonfires 
and ate them without bread, generally devouring them 



WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY 227 

half cooked, to their souls' delight. In the evening came 
sausage chopping, souse making and a dozen other de- 
lights that counted for more with the boys and girls 
of that time than we can imagine now. With all their 
hardships and with all the crudity of their lives, we have 
no occasion to pity those happy colonial boys and girls 
who became our great grandfathers and great grand- 
mothers. 

One custom, which is now slowly passing away, but 
very slowly, was born of the conditions described in this 
chapter. The practice of giving all of Saturday in each 
week as a school holiday — a practice until recently well- 
nigh universal in America — seems to have originated in 
the circumstances of colonial life herein set forth. As 
there were no competent servants available, every family 
in that time must do its own work — outdoor and indoor. 
As Sunday was very rigidly observed as a sabbath, and 
as all work was forbidden on that day, the boys of every 
family were needed on Saturday to cut and split the 
Sunday's supply of wood, and to do such other things as 
might serve to spare work on Sunday. The girls were 
needed to roast meats, bake beans, make pies, and in 
other ways to provide supplies that might carry the fam- 
ily over Sunday without the necessity of cooking. As a 
necessary consequence, schools were closed on Saturday 
in order that the boys and girls might help in the neces- 
sary preparation for the sabbath, and although the con- 
ditions which gave birth to the practice have long since 



228 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

passed away, the practice itself survives in most schools, 
even unto this clay, as practices and customs that have 
their origin in necessity usually long survive the neces- 
sity that gave them birth. 

So far as the records that remain to us show, the 
'< servant problem " was never so acutely felt in the other 
colonies as it was in New England. There are several 
suggestions of reasons for this. For one thing the other 
colonies were more abundantly supplied with the neces- 
saries and luxuries of life than the New England set- 
tlements were. For another the colonists, outside of New 
England, led a more generous, a less exacting and a 
more entertaining life than did the New Englanders. 
There was less of insistence upon prayers and thanks- 
givings and fasts and church attendance to afflict the 
servant class. But chiefly the difference probably lay in 
the fact that white and black servants were much more 
plentiful in the other colonies than they were in New 
England, and in slavery the negro especially is a much 
more docile servitor than any white person ever is. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

DRESS, SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS SUNDAY LAWS AND 

SUNDAY OBSERVANCES 



THE dress and manners of the colonists in that early 
first century of American settlement were rude, of 
course, if judged by the standards of our time. 
The farmers and other workingmen of the poorer class 
wore breeches made of leather. Those of the better to 




Colonial loom. 



do classes used such cloths as they could get. The 
breeches of all classes ended at the knee, below which 
were stockings with stout high shoes or boots for the feet. 

229 



230 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



The first cloth made in the colonies was woven of 
tow — which consists of the refuse fibers of the hemp. 
The outer clothing of women was made chiefly of what 
was known as linsey-woolsey or more 
commonly simply as linsey. It was a 
domestic cloth woven in home looms with 
cotton or hemp threads running in one di- 
rection and woolen threads running in the 
other. 

In the remoter districts many of the 
men who were engaged in lumbering and 
other such occupations clad themselves 
chiefly in the skins of animals, wild and 
domestic, and in leather. 

The early colonists, before a better to 
do class came out, particularly those in 
Virginia, had been rude, sport loving 
people in England and had lived more 
or less roughly there. In coming to 
America they had brought their manners 
and customs with them. In Virginia the 
people rejoiced in cockfighting, horse rac- 
ing and other sports which involved more 
or less of risk and brutality. They were 
especially fond also of hunting and shoot- 
ing. For this they had abundant oppor- 
tunity. There was not only the native wild game, from 
deer and black bears, to turkeys and partridges and squir- 



W at ch and 
chain of the colo- 
nial period, in 
possession of 
Charles Dray- 
ton, of Drayton 
Hall, S. C. 



SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS 231 

rels, for them to shoot but a more exciting sport was open 
to them. In the very earhest days after cattle, hogs and 
horses were imported, many of these animals strayed 
away into the vast swamps and forests, running wild 
there. In the course of a few years they developed 
breeds as untamed as those of the native wild animals 
themselves. To hunt these fierce wild cattle and still 
fiercer wild hogs, having cruel tusks four or five inches 
long and skill in using them, was a sport that es- 
pecially appealed to the rough but sturdy manhood of 
those early Virginians. There was excitement in the 
sport and quite enough of danger in it to give it zest in 
the minds of such open-air men as they were. 

In New England there was far less of the sporting 
impulse. The Puritans who first settled New England 
were men of exceedingly sedate minds. They were little 
given to sports or to enjoyment of any kind. They 
took life very seriously indeed, regarding this life in 
fact as nothing more than a period of probation for a 
life to come. It is true that in their industries and 
in their dealings they shrewdly took care of them- 
selves in all pecuniary ways but they were not given to 
frivolity of any sort, and except in so far as the chase 
might minister to the support of their families they in- 
dulged in it far less than did the lighter hearted Virgin- 
ians. 

There was one great day in New England for the 
assembling of the people and that was called muster day. 



232 



OUR FIRST CENTURY 



It was the day on which all the men of military age were 
summoned to receive that amomit of instruction in the 
military art which was deemed necessary to render them 
fit for the soldierly duty of defending the colony against 
its enemies. Muster day was a day of universal frolic 
and enjoyment. On that day everybody drank hard cider 
in unlimited quantities, while those who had acquired a 

taste for it drank Ja- 
maica rum. It was 
on muster day that 
men who had offended 
against the law or 
against jDublic senti- 
ment, as represented 
by the church, were 
stood in the stocks or 
placed in pillory. It 
was the privilege of 
all those other men 
who had been drink- 
ing hard cider or 
Jamaica rum as the 
case might be, to pelt these unfortunates with clods or 
stale eggs, or whatever else in the way of a missile might 
be handy. Muster day and other days of public gather- 
ing were selected for the punishment of these men in 
order that they might be thus shamed into a better life, 
and in order that others might be deterred from offences 




Costume of a burgomaster of New 
Amsterdam. (From a portrait in the 
New York Historical Society.) 



SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS 



233 




Costume from portrait 
of Major Robert Pike 
(1690). 



such as they had committed, by seeing the severity of 
their punishment. 

In all of the colonies there were special efforts made 
to curb the tongues of scolding women. In Virginia, 
and in some others of the colonies, an old English law 
was revived and enforced for the 
punishment of " common scolds." 

Women convicted of this offence 
were fastened into a seat at the end 
of a swinging pole hanging over the 
water of a pond and were forcibly 
ducked again and again until half 
exhausted by the experience. The 
apparatus used for this purpose was called a ducking stool 
and the punishment seems to us, in our time at least, a 
cruel one. 

In Massachusetts and some other colonies a different 
method, but one scarcely less severe, was employed. 
There every woman who was convicted of scolding was 
gagged, bound in a chair, and placed at her own front 
door where all passers-by might see and jeer at her. It 
is not recorded in the annals of that time that any 
law against scolding was enforced in the case of men who 
indulged in that vice. To us it would .seem that 
men, if they had been generous, ought freely to have 
granted to women the small privilege of scolding, which 
was almost the only form of protest they could make 
against the oppression of their lives — for in that hard 




234 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

time the lives of women were indeed sorely oppressed. 
After all, the revolt of the colonies against English op- 
pression, which much later developed into revolution, 
was for a long time nothing more than an indulgence in 
scolding. But in that day women were held to a much 
severer discipline than men thought it necessary to im- 
pose upon themselves. 

The authority of the church, as 
we have seen, was dominant in New 
England communities, and so all 
profane swearing was regarded and 
treated as an offence against the 
law. Such swearing was punished 

Costume from the 

portrait of Jonathan by the pmchmg of the tongue with 
Mason (1695). a split stick and by the exaction of a 

fine in addition. It was an era in which it was thought 
possible to make men and women moral by legal enact- 
ments and to compel good behavior by fear of punish- 
ment. In order to accomplish that result, which has 
been impossible in all history, the law in most of the col- 
onies prescribed for certain offences that men should be 
whipped on the bare back or burned with a hot iron, or, 
in extreme cases, that their ears should be cut off. For 
the very gravest offences it was prescribed that men and 
women should be burned alive or hanged in chains. 
These extreme penalties, however, were very rarely in- 
flicted. 

There were other punishments which must have been 




SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS 235 

scarcely less grievous to those who suffered them and 
these were frequently prescribed. Common as it was 
to drink rum and hard cider, and familiar as the people 
of that time must have been with the sight of men under 
the influence of alcohol, the law drew a rigid line at ha- 
bitual drunkenness. A Httle spree on muster day or at 
other times of festivity was lightly regarded, but habitual 
drunkenness was treated as a crime to be rigorously pun- 
ished. A part of the punishment con- 
sisted in compelling the offender to 
wear upon his breast a big letter " D," 
the presence of which should proclaim 
and advertise his shame to all his neigh- 
bors. Those who have read Haw- collar of Gov. 
thorne's superb romance of "The John Endicott 
Scarlet Letter," know that for offences 
against chastity on the part of women a like terrible 
punishment was inflicted. A woman found guilty by the 
church or by the law — for the two were substantially the 
same in that time — was compelled to advertise her own 
shame by wearing always upon her chest the scarlet let- 
ter "A." 

In the colonies, as everywhere else, laws and severe 
punishments utterly failed to make men and women more 
moral than they were naturally inclined to be. In spite 
of laws, drunkenness was far more common then than 
now, while heavy drinking, falhng jus* short of drunk- 
enness was well nigh universal, even ministers indulging 




236 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

freely. As for chastity, the records show that there was 
a very high percentage of illegitimacy at that period. 

The Puritans brought with them to this country a fixed 
idea that the first day of the week, or Sunday, should be 
observed as a Sabbath, not only with all the rigor of the 
Mosaic law of Sabbaths, but with even more of restric- 
tion upon men's liberty to do as they 
pleased. Even in Virginia, where the 
people were easy-going, and far less in- 
Collarof Gov clined than men in more rigorous climates 
Edward Wins- were to cnforcc their views upon other 
'^ people, there were rigid Sunday laws 

which, if they had been enforced, would have interfered 
seriously with the comfort and freedom of the people. 

Fortunately for the people of Virginia they were never 
enforced. It was the custom of everybody in that colony 
to go to church, if for no other reason, because at church 
every man met his neighbors and could there talk over 
such matters of common concern as might be of interest. 
Usually the gentlemen of Virginia, having gone to church 
and having greeted the gentlewomen as they alighted 
from their carriages at the door of the sanctuary, went 
off into the groves nearby and there, sitting under the 
trees, discussed matters of common concern while the 
gentlewomen within the church listened to the services 
and made the responses prescribed by the liturgy. Be- 
yond that, Sunday laws were never rigidly enforced, 
either in Virginia or in the colonies lying farther to the 



SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS 



237 



south. A fervent sun seems always, in every land, to be 
antagonistic to rigidity in such matters as these. 

In colder New England the Sunday laws were enforced 
to the letter. pA^erybody in those colonies was required to 
go to church or to furnish a sufficient reason for having 




Dutch costume. (From an engraving on the tankard presented to 
Sarah Rapelje, the first white person born in New Netherland.) 

stayed away. In Massachusetts the law provided that 
no person should be permitted to walk in the streets on 
Sunday except in reverently going to church or return- 



233 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

ing from the services. In those parts of the Massachu- 
setts colonies in which the seashore lay near, it was 
especially forbidden that people should wander to the 
beaches, even though, upon reaching them, they should 
sit down and reverently contemplate God's work in creat- 
ing the ocean whose surf beat at their feet. 

Both at the North and at the South, it was the cus- 
tom to have two or three religious services during a sin- 
gle Sunday, with a long intermission at noon for lunch- 
eon. In New England and some of the other colonies, 
there were little houses or shanties built near the meet- 
ing house, so that the people might be kept warm and 
dry during this dinner recess. These were called " noon 
houses." Sometimes, instead of several small noon 
houses, one large one was built to serve all the people 
at once. The churches were not warmed at all, so that 
between services often lasting for many hours at a time, 
the comfort of the noon houses was exceedingly wel- 
come. In the Southern colonies neighboring planters 
entertained the congregation at their homes during the 
noon hour. In one recorded case a single planter of 
great wealth and liberality, always did this for all 
comers. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

SUPERSTITION AND WITCHCRAFT 

THE people of that time were not only deeply reli- 
gious. They were also profoundly superstitious. 
They believed in all kinds of " signs and omens." 
Lovelorn girls would swallow chickens' hearts whole, and 
wish for the favor of their lovers while doing so, and 
they were confident that such a charm would " work." 
When peeling apples it was their custom, if they man- 
aged to make a single peeling of a whole apple, to throw 
it over their shoulders, wishing at the moment, and then 
to decipher from its sprawling position on the floor some 
letter which might be the initial of a desired lover's name. 
When the thrifty housewife was churning if the butter was 
slow to " come " the good woman always concluded that 
there were witches in the churn, and by way of exorcis- 
ing them she would drop red-hot horse shoes into the 
milk. When pigs grew sick it was promptly assumed 
that somebody had bewitched them and by way of re- 
moving the spell the farmer cut off the ears and the tails 
of the animals and burned them in a fire, uttering well- 
understood incantations. 

At that period in the world's history the belief in 

239 



240 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

witchcraft was general, not only in the colonies in 
America but equally in England. Even Sir Matthew 
Hale in England, great jurist that he was, sat upon the 
bench, conducted trials for witchcraft and condemned 
men and women to be put to death for that crime. It 
is not a matter of wonder therefore that among the 
colonists who were far less well educated than the ju- 
diciary of England, the behef in witchcraft was general. 
In almost every colony there were witchcraft trials from 
time to time and it was only when this belief became 
epidemic at Salem, and resulted in some excesses there, 
that it was driven out of the minds of the people. 

The way of it was this. Near the end of the seven- 
teenth century certain girls in Salem, who were probably 
suffering from the malady known as hysteria, insisted 
that they had been bewitched. They charged certain 
persons in the community with the crime of having be- 
witched them. They offered no proof of this, but the 
courts accepted their testimony and condemned the 
people whom they accused to suffer the pains and penal- 
ties imposed by the law upon those who practiced witch- 
craft. In our day, even if witchcraft were believed in, 
the courts would insist that in the case of any accused 
person, the charge that he or she had practiced that art 
should be proved beyond peradventure. But in the 
seventeenth century these things were largely taken for 
granted, and the accusations made were in many cases 
deemed conclusive in themselves. One hundred and 



SUPERSTITION AND WITCHCRAFT 241 

fifty persons first and last were arrested upon the 
charges of these girls, and twenty of them were put to 
death under judicial authority. 

Every delusion of that kind grows by what it feeds 
upon, and so, as one after another of the accused persons 
was executed, the girls raised their standards of accusa- 
tion. They had begun by laying their charges against 
poor and ignorant old women, but little by little they ad- 
vanced until at last they brought their accusations 
against persons of the very highest standing in the 
church and the community. 

This made the matter serious. To hang or burn a 
poor old crone for witchcraft was one thing, but it was 
quite another to hang or burn a man or woman who 
stood high in the community and whose character was 
recognized as above impeachment. Even the loose-going 
courts of that time recognized this distinction, and pres- 
ently the prosecutions were halted, and reason again 
asserted itself. The belief in witchcraft waned, and 
still more the people and the courts ceased to regard 
with credence the accusations of these hysterical girls. 

Indeed there was a pronounced reaction from this 
craze. The very jurymen who had condemned witches 
to death, publicly begged pardon of their neighbors for 
having done so, and at least one of the judges, who 
had sentenced persons to death on charges of witch- 
craft, not only apologized for his offence, but volun- 
tarily subjected himself to a rigorous fast once a year 
P 



242 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

so long as he should live, as an act of penance for his 
crime. 

From that day till this the belief in witchcraft has 
never manifested itself in this country in a grievous 
way. There are some even now who believe in such 
things, but their beliefs are not accepted by intelligent 
people and nothing could be more impossible than the 
thought that any court in our country should now con- 
demn a man or woman to suffer death or even any 
lighter penalty on a charge of that kind. 



CHAPTER XXV 

COMMERCE, NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 

WHEN the people of Salem, Boston and Philadel- 
phia began building ships some new conditions 
were created out of which a good deal of history 
was destined to grow. 

The young sailors of the colonies set forth in these 
ships to seek their fortunes. They quickly built up a 
profitable trade along the coast, exchanging the prod- 
ucts of the northern and southern colonies to the very 
great advantage of both. More important still, they 
traded to the West Indies, to the " Spanish Main " — as 
the coasts of central and South America were called — 
and to the Mediterranean. 

As a consequence of this trade the colonists began to 
grow rich and prosperous. They were trading their 
wheat, corn, tobacco, lumber, furs, skins, mackerel, cod, 
tar, pitch and turpentine, and whatever else they could 
produce, to the people of foreign lands for goods that 
were wanted in the colonies. 

But, as we know, these colonies had not been estab- 
lished for the benefit of the colonists. They had been 
planted with an eye single to the profit of English manu- 

243 



244 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

facturers and speculators. It did not please those Eng- 
lish manufacturers and speculators that the colonists 
should sell their wheat, corn, lumber, tobacco, fish, furs, 
and the like to other than English buyers, or that they 
'should take in exchange other than English goods or 
goods imported into England to be exported to the colo- 
nies at a large profit. 

The age was an arbitrary one, in which it was assumed 
that trade ought to be controlled by legal enactments, and 
that the natural instinct of men to better themselves by 
commerce should be restrained and regulated by statutes. 
The English notion was that the colonies existed solely 
for the benefit of English traders and manufacturers, and 
that any attempt on the part of the colonists to trade on 
better terms with other nations was an endeavor to rob 
the English traders of their rightful tribute. 

The colonists did not accept this view of the situation. 
They were, by their toil and their energy, producing 
valuable commodities. They were building and sailing 
ships to carry those commodities to market. They nat- 
urally sent them to the best markets they could find — 
the markets in which they could get the best prices for 
their commodities, while buying there the goods they 
wanted at the lowest prices. Accordingly they traded 
with the Spanish West Indies and with the Mediterra- 
nean countries, and through Spain with the far East, 
rather than with England. 

In order to check this the English government in 



NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 245 

165 I enacted a law which was intended to compel the 
English colonies in America to trade with England alone. 
This was called the Navigation Act. It prescribed that 
all the products of the colonies, in excess of their own 
needs, should be sent to England, or to England's col- 
onies, for sale. It provided further that all the goods 
l^roduced elsewhere in the world, which the colonists 
might wish to buy, should be bought only of English 
merchants. 

Now it so happened that the trading ships from the 
colonies could buy tea, for example, much more cheaply 
in Spain than they could in England, while at the same 
time they could sell colonial products — wheat, corn, fish, 
lumber, tobacco, hemp, wool, rosin and the like — for bet- 
ter prices in Spain than those which English buyers 
were willing to pay. In the same way the Yankee ships 
found it much more profitable to trade with the Spanish 
Main and the Spanish West Indies — exchanging their 
fish, grain, etc., for sugar, molasses, coffee, dyestuffs, 
spices and rum — than to carry on a like trade with 
those of the West India Islands which were held by the 
British. 

Accordingly the colonial shipowners and shipmasters 
refused from the first to obey that English Navigation 
Act which forbade them to trade with other countries 
than England and England's dependencies. They saw 
no justice in a law which sought to compel them to 
sell their colonial products in England for less than they 



246 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

could get for them in other countries, and to buy in Eng- 
land the goods they wanted at higher prices than those 
that were asked for the like goods in other countries. 

The colonists were altogether right in holding this law 
to be unjust. It was a law enacted by a government 
foreign to themselves for the sole purpose of compelling 
them to pay a money tribute to men in England who 
had done nothing whatever for the colonies. It was rob- 
bery, pure and simple, under the forms of law. 

For three-quarters of a century afterwards, similar 
laws were from time to time enacted in England with 
the sole purpose of compelling the colonists to sacrifice 
their earnings for the enrichment of men who had no 
claim whatever upon them. As we shall see in the next 
volume of this history, it was this spirit of resentment 
and resistance to injustice, chiefly, that led late in the 
next century to the Revolutionary War. 

It was too soon yet for such a revolt to occur, though 
Bacon's Rebellion, in 1676, strongly foreshadowed its 
coming. In the meanwhile this unjust Navigation 
Act, made into law in 165 1, had immediate and im- 
portant consequences. Colonial shipowners and ship- 
masters, feeling its injustice to be extreme, simply re- 
fused to obey it. They traded whithersoever they 
pleased, and depended upon their sagacity to evade the 
law on their return voyages. They bribed customs 
ofificers when that was necessary. They ran their ships 
into obscure and unguarded creek mouths — especially in 



NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 247 

the southern colonies where the whole coast is a tangled 
network of deep, half hidden water ways — and there 
unloaded them. 

But in the main it was not necessary to resort to these 
devices of concealment. PubHc sentiment in the colo- 
nies was so strongly in sympathy with the shipmasters 
in their determination to oppose, evade and defeat an un- 
just law, that nobody objected and nobody gave informa- 
tion, when ships that had traded with other countries 
than England, moored themselves to colonial wharfs 
without disguise or concealment, and there unloaded 
their cargoes. 

A sentiment of justice underlay all this. But the 
violation of law, even when the law is an unjust one, 
tends to breed in the mind a dangerously lawless senti- 
ment, and it proved to be so in this case. Smugghng 
and illicit trade were lawless of course. But even the 
best and most righteous men in the colonies consented 
to them, because of the law's injustice. The lawless 
spirit thus nurtured, after a while manifested itself in 
more dangerous ways. 

From smuggling, the minds of many shipmasters after 
a while reconciled themselves to piracy, and toward the 
end of the seventeenth century the seas east and south 
of the English colonies in America became infested with 
pirate ships, the more because the growing commerce 
of the colonies offered many and very rich prizes for the 
pirate crews to capture. 



248 OUR FIRST CENTURY. 

The distinction between smuggling and piracy is a 
broad one of course. The smuggler is one who brings 
forbidden goods into a port, or who evades the payment 
of the customs duties that the law requires him to pay 
upon goods not forbidden. The pirate is one who roams 
the seas, seizing such ships as he can capture, robbing 
them of their cargoes, and putting their crews to a cruel 
death. 

But this distinction was not always clearly recognized 
at the time when piracy began to be prevalent in the 
seas east and south of the English colonies in America. 
In all of the colonies, except Virginia and Massachusetts, 
there was, at first, a sentiment of toleration for the pi- 
rates so long at least as they preyed only upon Spanish 
ships, letting American vessels alone. They were re- 
garded as scarcely more than smugglers of a larger 
growth who had found and adopted new and more effi- 
cient means of opposing and defeating the unjust English 
trade laws. 

These pirates, who became abundant a little before the 
end of the seventeenth century, practiced robbery on a 
large scale. They seized ships on the high seas, robbed 
them of their cargoes and compelled the people on board 
of them to walk the plank into the sea. They made de- 
scents upon the coasts of Central and South America — 
the region then known as " The Spanish Main " — and 
committed depredations there of the most outrageous 
sort. Sometimes they descended upon our own coasts 



NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 249 

and made havoc there. Presently also they began seiz- 
ing Yankee ships as well as Spanish ones. 

In the main they were men of desperate character — 
the offscourings of the earth. But they had among them 
many men who had once been of a better kind. For 
one thing, it was their practice to recruit their depleted 
crews by seizing upon ships that were bringing out car- 
goes of white slaves from England. Very many of these 
men who were being carried out to serve in bondage 
preferred to join the pirates rather than be sold into 
servitude. Very many others, of tamer temper, preferred 
to become members of a piratical crew rather than "walk 
the plank " into the sea, which was the alternative offered 
them. But so lightly was piracy regarded in that time, 
that in some cases at least, men of high repute in church 
and in society, deliberately engaged in the nefarious busi- 
ness. 

Two of the colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, from 
the very beginning set their faces sternly against piracy. 
The other colonies, confounding it with smuggling and 
with still more justifiable means of resisting an unwise 
law, for a time lent more or less countenance to the evil 
thing. In the end, however, all the colonies came to 
understand how much of evil and crime piracy involved, 
and all of them joined in efforts to suppress it as a 
menace to their trade by sea. 

Near the end of the century (1696) the merchants of 
Plymouth, in England, whose ships in large numbers had 



250 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

been captured by the pirates, armed a vessel and placed 
one Captain Kidd, of New York, in command of it. 
They sent him out to make war upon these freeboot- 
ers of the seas. But instead of fulfilling his mission, 
he turned pirate himself, and with the lavishly equipped 
vessel which the merchants had given him, he presently 
became one of the fiercest scourges of the ocean. He 
ravaged the seas near the American coast and boldly 
sailed up many of the American rivers and inlets. Even 
to this day deluded men are frequently engaged in dig- 
ging here and there for the treasures which Captain 
Kidd is reported to have buried somewhere on our coasts. 

Kidd was caught at last and hanged for murder, as 
were also nearly all the other leaders of piratical en- 
terprises in that time. They were pursued and caught 
at first by the determined efforts of Virginia and Massa- 
chusetts ; a little later by those of the South Carolina 
authorities who practically made an end of the nefarious 
business. 

This extirpation of piracy was not completed until the 
eighteenth century was well into its teens, or even later, 
but it seems best thus briefly to tell the whole story here, 
rather than leave the conclusion of it to another volume. 

A shipmaster of Boston, who turned pirate, was caught 
and hanged in chains, and left hanging till the carrion 
crows picked his bones. This was done, as was pro- 
claimed at the time, in order that his punishment might 
" be a spectacle and so a warning to others." 



NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 251 



> 




Captain Edward Teach, commonly called Blackbeard, as represented in 
the History of the Pyrates, by Captain Charles Johnson, 1734. 



252 OUR FIRST CENTURY 

One of the most desperate and most terrible of the 
pirates, was a man who was known as " Blackbeard," 
because he wore a long beard which he pleated into awe- 
inspiring braids. Many of the Massachusetts and Vir- 
ginia expeditions that were sent out against the pirates, 
chased this peculiarly bloodthirsty desperado in vain. 
At last, in the early part of the eighteenth century, news 
of Blackbeard' s presence in an inlet on the coast of 
North Carolina reached the governor of Virginia. He 
promptly sent Lieutenant Maynard to the pirate's hid- 
ing place, with orders to take him and his crew, dead 
or alive. Blackbeard gave desperate battle of course. 
Among other precautions he stationed one of his men 
near his ship's powder magazine with orders to blow 
up the ship if by any chance Maynard should capture it. 

The battle that ensued was long and fierce, for May- 
nard and his Virginians were as resolute and as desper- 
ate in their courage as the pirate crew itself. Finally 
Blackbeard was killed, and when he was no longer alive 
to terrorize his men, Maynard succeeded in boarding and 
capturing his ship, and in making their possession of it 
complete before the men of the crew could carry out 
their dead leader's command to blow up the vessel with 
themselves and their conquerors on board. Maynard 
promptly cut off Blackbeard's head, hanging it to the 
bowsprit of the captured pirate ship, and sailed back to 
Virginia, where all his captives were promptly hanged 
for their crimes. 



NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 253 

In the meanwhile Stede Bonnet, who had been a rep- 
utable gentleman and a dignitary in the church before 
he took to piracy, had made himself scarcely less a terror 
of the seas than Blackbeard was. Learning that he, too, 
was lurking somewhere on the North Carolina coast the 
South Carolina authorities sent Colonel Rhett to capture 
him. Colonel Rhett was a determined and a sagacious 
person. He found Bonnet in Cape Fear River, fought 
him, overcame him, and carried him with all his crew to 
Charles Town, where the whole company of them were 
hanged. A little later the governor of South Carolina 
captured two more pirate ships, whose captains and 
crews he hanged. 

These events, with other similar happenings and 
hangings, made a practical end of piracy in the seas east 
and south of the colonies. 



I 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE WORK OF OUR FIRST CENTURY 

THUS at the end of the seventeenth century — a Ut- 
tle less than a hundred years after the first suc- 
cessful attempt was made to plant English colonies 
in America — twelve of the original thirteen colonies had 
been firmly estabhshed and built up into more or less 
prosperous communities by the courage, the endurance, 
the faith and the pluck of those who had come out to 
America to plant them. The thirteenth colony, Georgia, 
was not founded until the early part of the next cen- 
tury. 

The men who had begun this work at Jamestown 
were mainly unfit for it, but a better class had come to 
them and helped them. These, and the men who a little 
later settled in what is now Massachusetts, were the un- 
conscious founders of a nation. They did not know or 
dream what seed they were planting or what growths 
were to come of it. They were for the most part com- 
monplace, unimaginative people, living in their present 
and laying no large plans of nation building, but they 
were inspired in all the colonies by a courageous love 
of liberty and a resolute determination to maintain what 
254 



WORK OF OUR FIRST CENTURY 255 

they considered their rights at all hazards and against 
all encroachments. 

Their work was hard, their dangers great and their 
hardships almost unbearable. They conquered the wild- 
erness, they subdued the forests, they reduced the land 
to fruitful subjection. Under circumstances harder than 
any that we can now conceive they established English 
colonies on these coasts, colonies which were destined 
to grow into the greatest republic of all time. 

More important still, they planted here a sentiment 
of liberty and a determination of self-government which 
has grown and ripened and borne fruit throughout the 
world. It is not too much to say that every civilized 
nation has benefited by the teaching of American prin- 
ciples, all of which were fixed in the minds of those 
colonists who insisted upon governing themselves as a 
matter of natural right. It is not too much to say that 
every nation in Europe has been made freer and better 
by reason of this planting of the seeds of liberty in the 
American wilderness. 

In the next volume of this series we shall see how 
liberty, born of this seed, developed, and grew into 
proportions so great that the doctrine and practice of 
despotism became no longer possible as the fundamental 
principle of government in any really civilized country. 

THE END. 



APPENDIX 



TABLE OF IMPORTANT CONTEMPO^ 
RANEOUS EVENTS 



The Old World. 
Svend's (Danish King) conquest of 

England, 1002-14. 
Gradual closing of the trade routes 

to the East, 1400-1525. 
Capture of Constantinople, 1453. 
Search for new (outside) routes : 
Portuguese voyages along the Af- 
rican coast, 1 4 20- 1 498, 
Diaz reaches Cape of Good Hope, 
i486. 

Ferdinand, 1479-1516, 

and 
Isabella of Spain, 

(d. 1504). 
Henry VH of England, 1485-1509. 
Vasco da Gama (?) reaches India, 

1497-98. 



The Nezv World. 
Norse discovery, about 1000. 
Other possible voyages to 1347. 



Columbus's (S ') ist voyage, 1492- 

93- 
Papal Demarcation Line, 1493. 
Columbus's (S) 2d voyage, 1493. 



John Cabot's (E) voyages, 1497, 

1498. 
Columbus's (S) 2d voyage, 1498- 

1500. (S. America.) 
Amerigo Vespucci (S) ist voyage, 

1499 (?), with Hojeda. 
Cabral (P) (S. Amer,), 1500, 
Cortereal (P) (N. Amer.), 1500, 

1501. 
Columbus's (S) 4th voyage, 1502-04. 
Amerigo Vespucci (S & P), 2d, 3d 

and 4th voyages (S. Amer.), 1500- 

1503- 
First use of name America, 1507. 
Ponce da Leon (S), 1513, 1521. 
Balboa (S), 15 13. 



(S) Spanish; 



(E) English; (P) Portuguese; (D) Dutch voyages. 

257 



258 



APPENDIX 



The Old World. 



Frances I of France, 15 15-1547, 



Wars of the Huguenots in France, 
1 562-1 598. 

Queen Elizabeth of England, 155S- 

1603. 
Philip II of Spain, 1 556-1 59S. 

Defeat of Spanish Armada, 1588. 
Henry IVof France, 1589-1610. 
Edict of Nantes, 1598. 



The New World. 

Magellan's (S) expedition circum- 
navigates the globe, 1519-21. 

Cortez's (S) conquest of Mexico, 
1519-21. 

Verrazano (F), 1524. 

Gomez (S), 1524-25. 

De Ayllon (S), 1525. 

Narvaez (S), 1528 (De Vaca). 

Cartier (F), 1534-35, i54i- 

De Soto (S), 1539-42. 

Coronado (S), 1540-42. 

French (Huguenots) and Spanish 
in Florida, 1562-1567. 

St. Augustine (S), 1565. 

Frobisher (E), three voyages to N. 
Amer., 1 576-1578. 

Drake's (E) voyage around the 
world, 1 577-1 580. 

Raleigh's (E) expeditions, 1584- 
1590. 



APPENDIX 



259 



ENGLAND. NEW 

ENGLAND. 



MIDDLE 
COLONIES. 



SOUTHERN 
COLONIES. 



FRENCH 
COLONIES. 





Voyages of — 










Gosnold, 1602. 








James I, 1603- 


Pring, 1603. 






D e M o n t s' 


1625. 








grant, 1603. 


Ham p t o n 
Court Coufer- 


Weyrao'th,1605. 






Port Roy '1,1604. 


euce, 1604. 












Grant to the 




Grant to the 


C h a m p 1 a i n 
on coast, 1604. 




Plymo'thCo., 
1606. 




London Co., 
1606. 




Popliam Col- 




Jamestown Col- 






ony, 1G07. 




ony, 1607. 




Separatists; 
Pilgrims go to 








Quebec estb., 
1608. 


Holland, 1608. 












Hudson's (D) 


John Smith's 
explorations, 
1607-09. 


Lake Cham- 






Voyage, 1609. 


plain, 1609. 










Montreal estb., 










1611. 




John Smith ex- 




Second (1609) 
and Third 






plores coast. 








1614. 


Dutch establish 


C barters! 






trading posts 
on Hudson, 


(1612) of Vir-|L a k e Huron, 






ginia. 


discovered, 






1613-1615. 




1615. 
Lake Ontario, 




Grant to Coun- 




Representative 


1615, 




cil of New 




Assembly in 






Engl'nd, 1620. 




Va., 1619. 
Slaves intro- 




Pilgrims sail, 


Plymouth, 




duced, 1619. 




1620. 


1620. 








Parliamentary 


Grants to Gor- 


Dutch West In- 


Indian massa- 




Protestation, 


ges and Ma- 


dia Co. estb.. 


cre, 1623. 




1621. 


son, 1622, 


1621. 

First Colo- 
nists, 1624. 
Manhattan isl. 
settled, 1626. 


Virginia a Roy- 
al Provincie, 
1624. 




Charles I, 1625- 










1649. 










Struggle btw. 










King and Par- 


Endicott's Col- 








liament, 16 25- 


ony at Salem, 








1629. 


1628. 








King rules 


Mass. Bay Co. 


Patroon sys- 




Quebec cap- 


without Parlia- 


c h a r t ered, 


tem, 1629. 




tured by Eng- 


ment, 1629-1640. 


1629. 

Pviritan exo- 
dus to, 1629- 
1640. 
New Ham'sh're 






lish, 1629. 
Re t u rned, 
1630. 




Dutch on Dela- 




Lake Superior 




settlements, 


ware, 1631. 




d iscovered 




1628-30. 






1629. 



260 



APPENDIX 



ENGLAND. 



NEW 
ENGLAND. 



MIDDLE 
COLONIES. 



SOUTHERN FRENCH 
COLONIES. COLONIES. 



Govern iug Representative 
Board for Colo- system estb. 
nies estb., 1634. in Mass., 1634. 



Attack on Mass. 
Charter, 1635. 

C o n necticut 
tounded,1635- 
36. 

Roger Williams 
founds Provi- 
dence, 1636. 

Harvard Col- 
lege, 1636. 



Hampden Case. 
"Ship Mon- 
ey," 1637. 



Long Farlia- 
ment and the 
Civil War, 
1640-1019. 
"The Grand 

Remonstra'ce," 

1641. 
Outbreak of 

Civil War, 1642, 



Charles I, Exe- 
cution, 1649. 
Com 'onwe'th 
and Protector- 
ate (1649-1660). 



NavigationAct. 
1651. 



Rhode Island 
settled, 1638. 

New Haven set- 
tled, 1638. 

" Fundamental 
Orders" of 
Conn., 1639. 

Gorges' Royal 
Charter to 
Maine, 1639. 



.Mass. "Body of 
Li berties," 
1641. 

N e w England 
Confederat'n, 
1643. 

Roger Williams 
secures Char- 
ter from Par- 
liament, 1643. 

Federation of 
New Haven 
towns, 1643. 

Union of Rhode 
Island towns, 
1647. 



New ICngland 
maintains its 
independence 
of Parli'me't, 
etc., to 1660. 



Swedish Colony 
on the J Dela- 
ware, 1638. 



New Haven's 
attempt to 
colonize on 
Del. 1641. 



Indian troubles 
in New Neth- 
erland, 1643- 
45. 



S t u y vesant. 
Gov. of New 
Nether hind, 
1647-1664. 



Dutch establ'sh 
Fort Casiniir 
on Delaware, 
1651. 

Dutch capture 
"New Swe- 
den," 1655. 



Maryl'nd grant. Lake Michigan, 
1632. Colony 1634. 
estb., 1634. 



Rebellion in 
Virginia vs. 
Gov. Harvey, 
1635. 



Champlain's 
death, 1635. 



Gov. Berkeley's 
lirst admr. in 
Virginia, 1642- 
52. 



Toleration Act, 
Mary land, 
1649. 

Cavalier migra- 
tion to Vir- 
g i n i a, 1649- 
1660. 

VMrginia recog- 
nizes Com- 
monwealth, 
1652. 

Virginia a self- 
governi'g col- 
ony, 1 652-1 ()00. 

Civil War in 
Md., 1654-57. 



Explorations 

of the 

Northwest 

as far 



Wisconsin, 
1640—1660. 



Lake Erie dis- 
covered. 



APPENDIX 



261 



ENGLAND. 



NEW 
ENGLAND. 



:\IIDDLE 
COLONIES. 



SOUTHERN 
COLONIES. 



FRENCH 
COLONIES. 



The Restora- 






Gov. Berkeley's 




tion—Charles 






second admr. 


French 


TI, 1660-85. 






in Virginia, 


Council of 






1660-1677. 




Trade estb., 
1660. 






Long Assembly 


exploration 


NewNavigati'n 






i n ^'irginia, 




Acts, 1660, 






1661-1676. 


and 


1661. 


Roj^al Charter 
to Connecti- 
cut, 1662. 

New Haven an- 
nexed. 






colonization 


C o nv cuticle 


Roval Charter 






continues. 


Act, 1664. 


to 'Rhode Is- 










land, 1663. 


Grant to the 


Charters of the 






Royal Commis- 


Duke of Yorli 


C a r o Unas, 




War with Hol- 


sion in Mass. 


of New Yorlv 


1663, 1665. 




1 a n d, 1664- 
1667. 


Bay, 1664. 


1664. 








Siirrender of 










New Nether- 










land, 1604. 










Grant of New 










Jersey to 










Berkeley and 










Carteret, 1664. 










"p]ast Jersey" 










settled, 1665- 


"The Funda- 








67. 


mental Con- 
stitution" of 
C a r o linas, 
1669. 








Berkeley sells 


C h a r 1 e ston 








his share of 


founded, 1670. 


F r o n t e n ac, 


New Naviga- 




New Jersey 




(lov. of New 


tion Act, 1672. 





to Quakers, 
1672. 
Recouquestand 
Restor'tionof 




France, 1672- 
82. 

Marquette and 


War with Hol- 




New York and 




Joliet on the 


land, 1672-74. 




Jerseys, 1673- 
74. 
West Jersey 
colonized by 


Bacon's Rebel- 
lion in Vir- 


JNIississippi, 
1673. 




King Philip's 


Quak'rs, 1675- 


ginia, 1676. 






War, 1675-76. 


77. 








Mission of Ran- 




Rebellion in 






dolphtoMass. 


Andros,Gov. of 


M a r y land, 






Bay, 1676-81. 


N. Y., 1674-83. 

Grants to Wm. 

Penn of Pa. 

and Del., 1681- 

82. 


1676. 


Hennepin on 




New Ham'sh're 


P ennsylvania 




t h e Upper 




a Royal Prov- 


settled, 1682. 


Lord Culpeper, 


31iss., 1680. 




ince, 1679-85. 


Dongan, Gov. 
of N. Y.,1683- 
88. 


Gov. of Vir- 
ginia, 1679-84. 


La Salle ex- 




Mass. Bay Char- 


Joint Indian 




plores Miss. 




ter annulled, 


Treatv at Al- 




Valley to the 




1684. 


bany,"l684. 




Gulf, 1679-82. 



262 



APPENDIX 



ENGLAND. 



NEW 
ENGLAND. 



MIDDLE 
COLONIES. 



SOUTHERN 
COLONIES. 



FRENCH 
COLONIES. 



Duke of York 




New York be- 


Huguenot (•(•Io- 
nization, lol- 


Fort St. Louis 


becomes King 




comes a Roy- 


estb., 1682. 


James II, 




al Province, 


lowing rev- 




1685-89. 




1685. 


ocation of 
Edict of 




I n a ugurates 


Andros, Gov. of 




Nantes, 1685. 




neAv colonial 


New Engla'd, 


P r oceedings 


Spanish destroy 




policy. 


1686-89. 


against New 
Jersey Char- 
ter, 1686-88. 
Andros, (lOV. 
also of New 
York andNew 
Jersev, 1688- 
89. 


Port Royal, 
S. C, 1686. 


De Nonville. 
Gov. of New 
France, 1685- 
89. 


English Revo- 


Revolution 


Leisler's Revo- 


Coode's Rebel- 




lution, 1688- 


against An- 


lution inNcAV 


lion in IMarv- 


Frontenac,G'v. 


89. 


dros' govern- 
ment, 1689. 


York, 1689. 


land, 1689. 


second time, 
1689-98. 


William and 










Mary su'c'ed, 










1689-1702. 










Bill of Rights, 










1689. 










War with 










Louis XIV of 










France, 1689- 


French and In- 


Destruction of 




Sir Wm. Pliips 


97. 


dian incur- 


Schenectady, 




(E.) captures 




sions, 1690. 


1690. 




Port Roval , 




^Massachusetts 


Leisler's Con- 




1690. 




New Charter. 


vention at Al- 


M a r y land a 


Recaptured bv 




1691, Plym- 


bany, 1690. 


Royal Prov. 


the French', 




outh, Maine 


Leisler execut- 


ince, 1691. 


1691. 




and Nova Sco- 


ed, 1691. 








tia annexed. 










Salem witch- 










craft delu- 










sion. 169'J. 










Rhode Island 










and Conn, re- 




Andros, Gov. of 






tain their 




Virginia, 1692. 






Charters, 




College of Wil- 






1692. 




liam and :\Ia- 
ry founded 








Pennsylvania, a 


1693. 


Ft. Kaskaskia 






Royal Prov- 




estb. in Miss. 






ince, 1693-94. 




valley, 1695. 






Res t ored to 




New Found- 






Penn, 1694. 




land captured 
b V French, 




Andover, Mass. 






1696. 


Board of Trade 


sacked by 






Peace of Rvs- 


estab., 1G9G. 


French, 1697. 


New Ham'shire 
a Royal Prov- 
ince,' 1698. 




wick, 1697. 

Iberville fo'nds 
French colo- 
ny i n Louisi- 
ana, 1699. 



INDEX 



Accidents in discovery, i. 

Adultery, punishment of, 235. 

Agriculture, Colonial, iSo, et 
seq. 

Albemarle Colony, 117, 

Andros, Governor of New Jersey, 
New York and New England, 
142, et seq. ; his despotic rule, 
143 ; arrested and banished by 
Massachusetts, 144. 

AvALON, Baltimore's first colony, 
107. 

B 

Bacon, Nathaniel, 152; commands 
Virginia Army, 153; proclaimed 
and arrested, acquitted, 153, 154 ; 
driven into rebellion, 156; burns 
Jamestown, death, 157. 

Baltimore, Lord, 106, 

Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, 
151, et seq.; arrests Bacon, 154; 
confiscates estates and hangs 
twenty-three colonists, 157 ; re- 
called in disgrace by the King, 

157- 
Blackbeard, the pirate, 252. 
Blockhouses, 208. 
Bonnet, Stede, pirate, 253. 
Bradford, Wilham, 71. 

C 

Calvert, George, 106; Cecil, 

108. 
Cannibalism at Jamestown, 43. 



Carolina, Grant of, 116; absurd 
constitution of, 118; Constitu- 
tion abandoned, i 20 ; Port Royal 
settlement, 120; removed to 
Ashley River, 121 ; Charles Town 
founded, 121 ; Huguenot im- 
migration, 122; crop problems, 
123; rice, 124; indigo, 124; 
Indian war in Carolina, 125; 
soil, climate and physical ad- 
vantages, 125 ; planters' houses, 
126; naval stores, 126. 

Carver, John, first governor of 
Plymouth, 66. 

Cavaliers, immigration of, to 
Virginia, 115, 148; their char- 
acter and standards of conduct, 
148. 

CiiAMPLAiN founds New France, 
160. 

Charles, II, his effort to reduce 
colonies to subjection, 140 ; an- 
nulment of charters, 141. 

Charter, the Great, of Virginia. 
54 ; its grant of the rights of 
Englishmen and private owner- 
ship of land, 54 ; declaration of 
rights, 59. 

Churchgoing, in Virginia, 236; 
in New England, 237 ; double 
services, 238 ; noon houses and 
dinner entertainment, 238, 230. 

Claiborne, William, rebels 
against Baltimore, 109. 

Cloth making in the colonies, 
188. 

Coffee and Tea, in the colonies, 

263 



264 



INDEX 



i86 ; attempts to grow in New 
England, i8o, et seq. 
Colleges, earliest in America — 
Harvard and William and Mary, 

193- 

Colonies, earliest one planted 
under London and Plymouth 
Companies' charters, failed, 15. 

Colonists, character of earliest, 
15, 16, 21. 

Colony, first English, planted at 
Jamestown, 15, 21; absence of 
women, 18; governmental mis- 
takes, 18; guarantee of rights, 
18; idleness of the people, 26; 
neglect of opportunities, 27, 28, 
32 ; two women arrive in 1608, 39 ; 
first New England planted at 
Plymouth, 60 ; early chfficulties, 
69; prosperity, 70 ; John White's 
73 ; Massachusetts Bay founded, 
74 ; its charter, 75. 

Commerce, Navigation Laws 
AND Piracy, chapter on, 243, 
et seq. 

Communism, in Virginia, iS, 19, 
2;^, 49 ; at Plymouth, 69. 

Conditions in England that led 
to colonizing, 11, et seq. 

Confederation of New England 
colonies, first, 99, 100. 

Connecticut, migrations to, from 
Massachusetts, 89, et seq. ; 
union of Connecticut colonies, 
91 ; first constitution, 91. 

Constitution, fiist written in 
America, 91. 

Crops, in the colonies, 180, et seq. 

D 

Dale's Government in Virginia, 

45- 

De la Warr, saves Virginia 
colony, 44. 

Domestic Animals in the colo- 
nies, 184, 185. 

Dress of the colonists, 229, et seq. 

Drinking in the colonies, 186. 



Drunkenness, punishment of, 
235- 

Dutch, in New Netherland, 85, 
et seq. 

E 

Education, Religion & Mar- 
riage, chapter on, 192, et seq 
lack of education, 192 ; no free 
schools and few of any kind 
193 ; early educational move 
ment in Massachusetts, 193. 

Endicott, Governor of Massa 
chusetts, bigot and persecutor. 
80. 

Error, fundamental, in sending out 
colonies, 14, et seq. 

F 

Failures of early colonies, 15. 
Families, large in New England, 

196, 197. 
Farm Implements, traded to 

Indians at Jamestown, 26; 

scarcity of, in all colonies in early 

years, 39; become plentiful, 54; 

rudeness of, 205. 
Farm Animals, 54; run wild in 

Virginia, 54, 231, et seq. 
Firearms of the colonists, 205, 

et seq. 
First Century, work of, iSo, 

et seq. ; general review cf, 254, 

et seq. 
Fisheries, New England engaged 

in, 163, 182. 
French in America, 160; Quebec 

founded by Champlain, 160; 

priests and traders, 161, 162 ; 

extensive explorations made by, 

162 ; relations with Indians, 

168; quarrel with the Iroquois, 

168; French & English hostility, 

172; King William's war, 172, 

et seq. 
Frontenac, 172. 
G 

Gates and vSomers, expedition, 
41, et seq. 



INDEX 



265 



Gorges & Mason, grants and set- 
tlements, 82, 83. 

Green, Roger, plants first settle- 
ment in the Carolinas, 117. 

H 

Harvey, Governor of Virginia, 
150, 151. 

Hennepin, explorations of, 167, 

Hooker, Thomas, pioneer in Con- 
necticut, 90. 

Hudson, Henry, discoveries, 84. 

Huguenots, in CaroHna, 122. 

Hutchinson, Anne, banished 
from Massachusetts and flees to 
Rhode Island, 94, 95. 



Ignorance, and credulity in 14th 
and 15th centuries, 3, 5. 

Independence, Spirit of, in the 
colonies, 159. 

Indians, in Virginia, peaceful at 
first, 30 ; partially civilized, 30 ; 
outbreak of, in 1622, 58; hostil- 
ity at Plymouth, 67 ; relations 
with the Dutch, 102, 103, 104 ; 
with the French, 16S; King 
Philip's War, iii; in Carolina, 
1 25 ; massacre and war in Vir- 
ginia, 152; modes of warfare, 
207, 209 ; sources of trouble, 
208 ; horrors of Indian war, 176. 

Industries in the colonies, 180, 
185. 

Infant Mortality, excessive in 
New England, causes of, 196. 

Intercourse, lack of, between 
early colonies, 97 ; effect on de- 
velopment of institutions, 99; 
shipping and commerce as agents 
of closer intercourse, 99, et seq. 

Iron, early production of, 187, 188. 

J 

Jamestown settlement, 23 ; char- 
acter of site, 24 ; colony aban- 
doned and reestablished, 44 ; 



town captured and burned by 
Bacon, 156. 
JoLiET and Marquette, explora- 
tions of, 165. 

K 

Kidd, Captain, turns pirate, 249, 

250. 
King Philip's War, in, et seq. 
King William's War, 172, et seq. 



La Salle, explorations of, 165, 
166. 

Leather, manufacture of, 191. 

Leisler, Jacob, leads rebellion in 
New York, 146; hanged, but 
afterwards honored, 147 ; char- 
acter of, 147. 

Life in the Early Colonies; chap- 
ter on, 204 ; conditions of, at first, 
77, 78 ; roads, bridges, horses and 
vehicles, 78, 204, 205 ; religious 
interference in domestic life, 198 ; 
P^irearms. 205, et seq. ; Pikes 
and half pikes, 207 ; Indian 
troubles, 207, 208 ; Indian dan- 
ger as affecting life conditions, 
207,208, 209; blockhouses, 208 ; 
farming mistakes, 209, 210; ef- 
forts to grow tropical crops, 180, 
186, 209, 210; Sawmills, whip 
saws, etc., 211; absence of stoves, 
212; imperfect heating, 212; no 
coal used, 212; fireplaces, cook- 
ing utensils, cranes and trivets, 
212; cold houses, bed curtains, 
feather beds and warming pans, 
213, 214; methods of cooking, 
213, 214 ; kitchens, 214; candles 
and torches, 215 ; mud and stick 
chimneys, 215 ; chimney sweeps, 
215, 216; method of keeping 
fire, 216 ; beds and bedding, 216; 
neighborly habits, 216, 217; 
house raisings, quiltings, log roll- 
ings and corn huskings, 217, 218 ; 
white and black slaves, 219, et 
seq. ; the vexed servant question, 



266 



INDEX 



219, et seq. ; -women's -work, 
224 ; moral influence of hard life 
conditions, 224, 225 ; the frolic 

^ element in work, 225 ; hog killing 
and other occasions, 226. 

London Company's Charter, 14. 

M 

Maine & New Hampshire, settle- 
ments in, 82, et seq. 

Manufactures in early colonies, 
chapter on, 187, et seq.; discour- 
aged and forbidden by English 
law 187; efforts to stop, 189; 
colonial laws to encourage 190, 
191. 

Maryland, founded 106. et 
seq. ; powers of colony, 108. 

Mason & Gorges, grants to, 82, 

83- 

Marquette and Joliet, explora- 
tions of, 165. 

Massachusetts Bay colony 
founded, 74 ; charter, 75 ; great 
migration to, 76 ; early Ufe con- 
ditions, 77, 78 ; character of 
early colonists, 78 ; migrations 
from, 89 et seq. ; religious dis- 
content in, 89, 90 ; confederation 
with other colonies, 99, 100 ; an- 
nulment of charter, 141, 142; 
Andros made governor of New 
York, New Jersey, and New 
England, 142 ; despotic proceed- 
ings, 143 ; arrested and exiled by 
Massachusetts, 144 ; early educa- 
tional effort in Massachusetts, 

193- 

Marriages, early age of in New 
England, 196; practical character 
of, 201; dickers for property con- 
siderations, 201 ; ministers did 
not officiate at first, 201 ; widows 
married in their shifts, 202. 

Migrations, within the colonies, 
122. 

Minuit, Peter, buys Manhattan, 
86 ; governor of New Sweden, 
102. 



Mississippi River, first explora- 
tions of, 165, 166. 

Mortality, of infants, excessive 
in New England, 196. 

Muster day in New England, 
customs of, 231, 232. 



N 



Nails, scarcity of, 188 ; buildings 
burned for their nails, 188; do- 
mestic manufacture of, 188. 

Navigation Act, terms of, 245 ; 
resistance to, 245, 246 ; conse- 
quences of, 246, 247. 

New Amsterdam, founded, 86; 
seized by English, 104, 105 ; 
name changed to New York, 
105. 

New England, first colony at 
Plymouth, 60 ; character of New 
England colonists, 78 ; union of 
New England colonies, 99; King 
Philip's war, iii et seq. ; troubles 
under Charles II and James II, 
142 ; Charter annulments and 
consolidation under Andros, 141, 
142 et seq. ; Andros banished, 
144 ; settlement of Rhode Island, 
95 ; migrations into Connecticut 
and settlements there, 89, 91 ; 
see also under names of individ- 
\ial colonies, shipbuilding, com- 
merce, Puritanism, etc. 

New Hampshire, 82, et seq., see 
Gorges & Mason. 

New Haven, Colony founded, 96 ; 
intolerance, 96 ; merged into 
Connecticut, 97, 

New Jersey, 129, et seq. ; grant to 
Berkeley & Carteret, 129; Eng- 
lish settlements in, 130; half of, 
sold to Penn and province di- 
vided, 130; Penn secures the 
whole, 130; converted into royal 
province, 130. 

New Netherland founded, 85, 
86; seized by English, 104, 105; 
name changed to New York, 105. 



INDEX 



267 



New Sweden founded, loi ; seized 
by New Netherland, 102. 

New York, seized by English, 105 ; 
political disturbances in William 
and Mary's time, 146; Leisler's 
rebellion, 146, 147 ; church not 
dominant in, 202, 203. 

Noon Houses, for churchgoers, 
238, 239. 



Paper Mill, first in America, 191 

Passage, Northwest, persistent be- | 
lief in, 2, et seq. j 

Patroons, grants to and powers of, I 
87. I 

Penn, William, 131, et seq. ; see 
Pennsylvania. 

Pennsylvania, 129, et seq. ; Penn's 
grant, 131 ; Delaware purchase, 
132, 133; Penn's landing, 133; 
plan of colony, 134; liberality, 
134; rapid settlement, 135; 
treaty with the Indians, 135, 
136. 

Pe<,)Uot War, account of, 97. 

Piracy, 247, 248; sentiment con- 
cerning, 248, 249 ; who the pi- 
rates were, 249, 250; Captain 
Kidd, 249, 250; Blackbeard, 
252 ; Stede Bonnet, 253 ; exter- 
mination of piracy, 253. 

Plymouth, settlement, 61 ; char- 
acter of colonists, 69, 72, 78 ; 
hardships of first year, 66 ; home- 
making people with wives and 
children, 69 ; communism, 69 ; 
chartered, 70 ; prosperity, 70 ; 
Bradford, William, governor, 71 ; 
soil and climate, 72 ; large im- 
migration during Charles I's 
time, 74 ; King Philip's war, in; 
confederation with other New 
England colonies, 99, 100. 

Pocahontas, story of, 2)7'> 50) 5i> 

PoPHAM, colony, 15. 
Printing Press, first in America, 
191. 



Profanity, punishment of, 234. 

Punishments, 229, et seq. ; ex- 
treme severity of, 234, 235. 

Puritans, in England, 62 ; in Vir- 
ginia and Maryland, no ; in New 
England, see Plymouth, Massa- 
chusetts Bay, Connecticut, etc. 

Q 

Quakers, persecuted in Massa- 
chusetts, 80; settle Pennsylva- 
nia. See Pennsylvania. 

Quebec founded, 160, 

R 

Raleigh, as a colonist, 10, et seq. 

Religion, dominance of in early 
New England, 80 ; rigidity of 
discipline, 80 ; intolerance, 80, 
194; requirements relaxed in 
Connecticut, 91 ; influence of, 
on colonial life, 194, et seq. ; bap- 
tisms, psalmody and sermons, 
196, 197, 198; effect on child 
life, 198, 199; greater tolerance 
in other colonies, 202. 

Remoteness of colonies from each 
other, and its effects, 97. 

Rhode Island, birthplace of ab- 
solute religious and personal Ub- 
erty, 95. 

Rum, use of in New England, 185, 
186. 



Salem, witchcraft at, 240, 241. 

Saturday, origin of holiday, 227. 

Sawmills, whip saws, etc., 211. 

Schools, lack of, 193; first school 
law, 193. 

Scolds, punishment of, 233. 

Self-Goveknment, beginning of 
in America, 54 ; during the Eng- 
lish Commonwealth period, 139, 
140; spirit of, in Massachusetts 
and Virginia, 140; Charles sec- 
ond's effort to repress, 140. 

Separatists, in England, 63. 



268 



INDEX 



Shipbuilding, in New England, 
163; effects of, 163, 164, 182, 
183, 184. 

Silk, in Virginia, 188, 189. 

Slaves, first negro, 57 ; white and 
black, 219, et seq. ; few negroes 
during first half century, 219; 
white slaves, facts respecting, 
220, et seq. ; iniquities of the traf- 
fic, 221 ; servant question in 
early New England, 222, 223 ; 
in Virginia and other colonies, 
228. 

Smith, John, 25 ; saves Jamestown 
colony, 26 ; character and 
achievements, ^3^ et seq. ; his gov- 
ernment and explorations, 35 ; 
story of Pocahontas, 37, et seq. ; 
sends map to Hudson, 84. 

Spanish Armada, story of, 7, et 
seq. 

Spanish explorations and settle- 
ments, 4. 
»-^S ports, colonial, 229, et seq. 

Standish, Myles, captain of Ply- 
mouth, 71. 

Stocks and pillory, 232. 

Stuyvesant, Peter, 102 ; conquers 
New Sweden, 102 ; surrenders 
New Amsterdam, 105. 

Sunday, laws and observances in 
New P2ngland, 236, 237, 238; in 
Southern colonies, 236. 

Superstition and Witchcraft, 
chapter on, 239, et seq. ; see 
Salem, and Witchcraft. 



Tanning, in the colonies, 191. 

Tea and Coffee, in the colonies, 
186. 

Tobacco, first culture of in Vir- 
ginia, 49 ; used as money, 50. 



Virginia, colony planted at James- 
town, 23 ; starvation, fever, etc., 



42 ; cannibalism, 43 ; settlement 
abandoned and re-established, 44 ; 
Dale's government, 45 ; private 
land ownership begun, 47 ; to- 
bacco introduced, 49 ; used as 
money, 50 ; extension of settle- 
ments and land ownership, 52 ; 
Argall's tyranny, 52 ; great charter, 
53 ; provisions of, 54 ; importa- 
tion of women, 55 ; negro slaves 
introduced, 57 ; declaration of 
rights, 59 ; cavalier immigration, 
115, 148; wealth and luxury, 
149 ; rebelhon against Harvey's 
government, 150; Berkeley's 
government, 151 ; Indian out- 
break and massacre, 152 ; Bac- 
on's rebellion, 156; Berkeley's 
revenge, 157 ; prosperity, 157, 
158; high standards of conduct, 
158. 

Virginia Companies, chartered 
as London and Plym.outh com- 
panies, 14. 

Virginia Colonists, character of 
first, 15, et seq.; later arrivals 
and their character, 39 ; life of, 
42, et seq. ; first two women, 39; 
neglect of opportunities, 40. 



W 



White, John, attempts colony and 

fails, 73, 74. 
Wild Hogs and cattle in Virginia, 

231. 
Williams, Roger, 92, et seq.; 

first established absolute liberty 

and equality of men in his Rhode 

Island colony, 94. 
Winthrop, John, governor, 76. 
Witchcraft and superstition, 

chapter on, 239, et seq. ; outbreak 

at Salem, story, 240. 
Women, absence of in Jamestown 

colony, 1 8 ; first two arrive in 

1608, 39; importation of wives, 

55- 



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